


A Rat's Life

by bardsmaid



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, Missing Scenes, Mytharc, Pre X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-11
Updated: 2012-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-14 00:12:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 155,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bardsmaid/pseuds/bardsmaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Alex Krycek backstory, fleshing out the Rat's life before and between the times we saw him on-screen, to fill in the blank spaces and make sense of this enigmatic but ultimately very human character. This exploration is a prequel to my Sanctuary series, and ends sometime in Season 6 when the Sanctuary narrative begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The plot twist pivotal to the prologue, below, is not a part of the on-screen X-Files universe, but neither does it overtly contradict what we see there. William B. Davis, who played the part of the infamous Cancer Man, when answering a fan question about a nearly identical premise, said he loved the idea. I found the possibility--and its many implications--intriguing.

PROLOGUE: CONTINGENCY PLANS

_1967\. The Cigarette Smoking Man does Teena Mulder a favor. But motives are rarely unselfish._

 

When the car pulls up in front of the Mulders' house, he remains briefly in the back seat, smoking one last Morley. For a moment he questions his decision to stop here at all, things between himself and Bill being what they are. But appearances are best kept up, and he wants to let Bill know he'll be out of town for the next week. London, that's what he's going to say. Bill should hear it from him rather than second-hand. A matter of trust. Or the appearance of it.

His cigarette grown stubby, he grinds the butt of the Morley out in the ashtray and takes the small bouquet of yellow roses and baby's breath from the seat beside him. Outside the car he brushes the wrinkles from his trench coat and starts up the walk slowly, head slightly bowed.

Fox answers the door. The boy scowls up at him, then remembers his manners. 

"May I help you?"

"Is your father home?"

The boy nods.

"And your mother--is she awake? Or is she resting?" He transfers the flowers from one hand to the other.

"She's in the sun room."

Footsteps sound on the stairs behind the boy, descending. Bill appears behind his son, his initial frown quickly adjusted to careful neutrality. 

"I wished to express my condolences," Spender begins, pressing forward into the tension of the moment. Fox slips away into the interior of the house. "And to let you know that I'll be out of the country for the next eight days. London. The usual."

"Very well." Bill pauses, then stands aside so his guest can pass. 

As he heads toward the sunroom, he can feel Bill's gaze burning the back of his trench coat. Fox emerges from the room, leaning slightly to one side to compensate for the toddler Samantha perched precariously on his hip. Spender attempts a smile for the girl but she's oblivious, caught up in the ride she's being given, all her attention focused on her brother.

He feels the corners of his mouth sink, pauses to compose himself and then steps into the brightly lit room. Teena is lying on the chaise, pillows propped behind her, a quilt covering her feet and legs.

"I'm sorry," he begins, "for your loss. I had to stop by to talk to Bill and I just wanted you to know." He steps closer and holds out the flowers; she takes them and lays them across her still-shapeless middle.

"The memorial service was yesterday," she says, and her eyes wander to vases set around the room. "Do you know how many people turn out for the burial of an infant?" For a moment she looks old beyond her years. "I don't know what to feel," she says after a short silence, and from the expression on her face, he can tell that this is true.

Her eyes were dry, he notes later, thinking back on it as the car speeds him toward Boston. He stares at the bag on the seat beside him, cornflower blue with all its little side pockets bulging, the covered nipple of a baby bottle protruding from the top. 

*~*~*~*~*

Halfway across the Atlantic he dozes off, only to be woken after twenty minutes by the squalling coming from the seat in front of him where a plain, stocky woman is trying to settle a red-faced infant. She puts up with the child with the calm that comes from years of experience and soon the baby quiets and begins to yawn. 

From between the seats he can see the redness in the child's skin fading. The infant's cries are either tired or angry, he notes, not the heartbroken wail of some babies. If it's a sign, it's a good one. Toughness is a virtue. Especially in times like these, with the stakes as high as they are.

The boy had been an accident of chance, an inadvertent product of the liaison between himself and Bill Mulder's wife. In truth, once his conception was known, it had proved the end of their affair. His sister's creation had been a deliberate act, a claim made on the fertile field of another man, a former ally become the weak link in the all-important chain of preparation for the future. But a second life--a needless, unwelcome complication... It was simply not supposed to be. 

Worse, Bill's latent suspicions about the two of them had been dragged into the light and shown to be undeniable truth. Bill's extended absence from the marriage bed gave the lie to any argument that the child could possibly be his, and the rest, unfortunately, had unraveled all too easily from the lips of his distraught wife. 

Needing to make amends to them both, he'd promised Teena he would take care of this unexpected complication to her life. No doubt she imagines a conventional adoption for the child: a family in a faraway western state, a life more suitable for him with some thankful, heretofore childless couple. And a biological heritage he'll never come to know. 

But opportunities are not to be wasted. The child will have his chance. After all, he notes, he himself grew up an orphan, and witness what he's achieved. Desire and ability will always out, a simple matter of natural selection. 

Yes, the boy will have his opportunity.

*~*~*~*

In Athens they change planes, the woman keeping some distance from him during this first leg of the trip, as instructed. She has a difficult time with the child; he fusses and cries for nearly an hour until finally, exhausted, he lapses into fitful sleep. The people around them loosen in relief.

Teena had taken his advice, hadn't so much as ventured a glance at the boy--didn't, for that matter, know it was a boy. She'd been sent home from the hospital several days later with a cover story about a tragic stillbirth. It will be enough to enable her to save face with the neighbors, and she and Bill will be able to proceed as before. Indifferent housemates, true, but at least able to keep up appearances.

*~*~*~*

At the airport in Tbilisi he paces the shabby corridors, stopping occasionally in front of the windows to watch the living gray-bleak mural outside. It's November and the Eastern world is covered in a coat of snow that will remain for the next six months. Once during the two-hour layover he passes by the woman to find the infant awake, eating voraciously, as if announcing to the world that he will survive at all costs.

 _Do you want to hold him?_  the woman gestures to him when the corridor empties and the child has drained the bottle; she speaks no English. He shakes his head and thrusts his hands into his pockets, fingers lighting upon the comfort of a fresh Morley. Shortly he resumes his rambling up and down the corridor. It's the bargain he's made with himself regarding the child: he must rise on his own, not cling to others. A chance is what he's being offered. He must make of it what he will.

*~*~*~*

Seven hours later he's sipping steaming tea in the crowded parlor of a tiny Moscow apartment. Across a small table from him, the only man who will know of the connection between father and son sits filling out a copy of the birth certificate information that will be presented to the institution. Fragrant steam rises from Dmitri Sherikov's neglected cup.

"The name?"

"Alex," he says, surprised by the unexpectedly odd sound of his voice, of actually pronouncing the name he's chosen.

"Aleksandr? Aleksei?"

He pauses a moment. Alexander seems far too pretentious for the boy's circumstances. "Aleksei."

"And as a patronymic?"

It's not something he's thought about. He shrugs. "Perhaps we could borrow your name."

'Aleksei Dmitrievich' is lettered neatly across the proper space on the form.

"Surname?"

"Suggestions?"

"Perhaps something Polish or Estonian or Czech." Sherikov puts down his pen. "If you plan to visit, the staff will surely know he is not Russian. An American name, of course, would defeat the entire purpose of hiding him here. So. Something foreign, but not too foreign. What do you think?"

Spender nods. A point well taken. It will make the boy an outcast in a way, but that could be all to the better--a test of his mettle, a polishing. If he surmounts the obstacles set before him, he could prove valuable indeed.

"What sort of name would you like?" Sherikov asks with a wave of his hand. "Borek, Pitkowsky, Stucka, Vacietis, Zarecki?"

Such a vast array of choices.

*~*~*~*

The plane to Sverdlovsk is crowded; an earlier flight has been grounded and all travelers to that city must take this plane. In spite of his efforts, he ends up having to sit next to the woman and child. The infant is awake for nearly half the three-hour flight, glancing at the woman, at random movement, occasionally at him. He has the dark blue, almost indeterminate-colored eyes of the newly born and seems to frown--world-weary? travel-worn?--when his focus rests on the man who has given him life. 

Turning away, Spender gazes out the window at passing cloud masses and considers the years until the scheduled date: forty-five. He is not a man easily romanced by assumptions, but if--just if--the boy were to turn out strong and sharp, he would be the perfect mole in a certain secret vaccine program being conducted thousands of miles to the east. What could be better than such a spy--a native son, fluent and embedded within the culture, who could pass along information inaccessible to the men who gather in the boardroom on East 46th Street?

If recent rumors regarding the alien agenda are correct, a child hostage may eventually be required of each family. But with this boy secreted away, someday he may be able to claim both a son and a daughter saved, supportive and useful, while Bill Mulder will have relinquished his only offspring to the aliens. Perhaps, in time, this boy may rise to do his father proud.

*~*~*~*

Tinny bells jingle a rhythm as the sleigh glides steadily over the snow. It will be another hour and a half--and no doubt dark--by the time they reach Sverdlovsk. Spender adjusts the heavy woolen scarf that covers his face until only his eyes are exposed to the chill world around them.

The institution was exactly as Sherikov had described it: not a massive, decrepit orphanage of the usual Russian variety, but an institutional home for boys who are better unacknowledged: inconvenient sons of generals, officials, high party members. The life they are offered is certainly not posh or easy: there are fields to be worked, discipline to be learned, schooling offered. But any who rise above the rest will be offered opportunities commensurate with their abilities and promise.

He will, of course, return--come here from time to time so the boy might know him, and so he can verify that his wishes are being carried out.

A sudden exclamation comes from the driver beside him--words muffed in wool--and a gloved hand touches his arm. A pause and the hand points to a place above the horizon where gray clouds have parted to show a patch of intense blue. Within minutes the western cloud face has dissolved into a thin haze and the silent trees around them are bathed in the diffused, golden glow of late afternoon. It looks almost like a scene from a Christmas card, he thinks. 

In the back of his mind, the child's fierce crying when handed over to an attendant has faded to a soft murmur. He looks up at the glistening, snow-laden branches beside the road and thinks ahead to home. 

\----------------------

PART 1 NARRATIVE

_Russian childhood to the car bomb_

 

A piece of advice: You don't want to live a life that's been planned out for you in advance. Especially if the guy pulling the strings is hoping to rule the world. At least from behind the scenes, and until he decides to hand it off to an alien race. And what he wants from you is for you to ask "How high?" as soon as he tells you to jump. Don't bother thinking for yourself, either, or having other plans; wouldn't want to look ungrateful for all he's done for you. Remember, this is the son of a bitch who handed his wife over to be used as a guinea pig in the consortium's hybrid experiments and saw himself as noble and sacrificing for doing it.

Of course, I didn't know any of this at the outset. What I knew was that I lived in a big cement building in a frozen land with sixty or so other skinny, dull-eyed kids. There were pale green walls and metal bunk beds, wary-eyed minders who kept you in line, squabbles with other kids, school. Meals, though they weren't enough to put any padding on any of us kids. Work in the institution's vegetable garden during the short summers, growing food to get us through the next long winter. And for anyone who managed to stand out in spite of the conditions there, a chance to go on to some sort of normal life.

Well, except for me. My road map was already planned out, remember? Every three or four months, this American man would come to see me. He told me he was my father. He'd ask me what I was learning, and whether I was being good. It was hard to understand his words, because the guy who was supposed to be teaching me English had a pathetic accent. But the old man's smiles spoke volumes. They were as thin as the winter sun.

He'd tell me about my family: a mother who'd had no use for me, and her husband who refused to let me live in his house.  I had a brother, and he lived with them because he belonged to the husband. My sister was there, too, but that was because the husband didn't know she was my father's. And me, I was here because I was special, because there were important things I'd need to do when I grew up. He'd bring me little things when he came: a pen that said Yankees, a pair of American sneakers. As soon as he left, the other kids would taunt me:  _Americanets, americanets!_  even though I'd grown up as Russian as the rest of them. Then the older kids would beat me up and take whatever trinkets the old man had left me. 

Even that, I figured out eventually, was part of the old man's plan. By making me an outsider, I'd have to learn to be tough, to protect myself.

Of course, what the old man told me about my family wasn't the straight truth; it was the script he wanted me to buy into, one that would eventually work to his own advantage. But I didn't know that. Nights, I'd lie in my bunk, as still as I could get, waiting for the mattress to warm up enough that I could fall sleep, and I'd ask myself what I'd done or what did I not have that I'd been so disposable to them. Why couldn't I be in America with my brother and sister? No matter what the old man told me, I didn't want to be here and 'chosen'. When you're eight, you'll trade any mission in the world for a soccer ball of your own and a room in a house where you don't wake up shaking from the cold and the gnawing in your stomach.

One thing I decided early: I was going to play my cards right. I was going to make it out of there to something better. I wasn't going to be dependent on the old man or anyone else.

So every few months there'd be these visits. The old man would show up and act like he was interested in what I'd been doing, but he was really there to make sure they were carrying out his orders, molding me the way he wanted. And on every visit he'd drop the word about my brother. Fox had done well in school that semester. Fox was getting tall. Fox was away at summer camp, water-skiing or swimming. The only swimming I'd ever done was in a dirty bathtub, or in mud puddles in the fields when it was rainy and we got into fights. Though you'd get punished for that; we were no use to them sick or damaged. Nothing to eat for a day and twice the penalty for anybody caught sneaking you bread. 

He didn't say much about my sister, except when he started talking about my 'mission'. She'd been taken by bad men and I could save her, he said, giving me one of those pasty smiles he was so good at. But what did I care? She was only a name to me, a story, and without her, maybe Bill Mulder might have a change of heart and consider filling her place with a threadbare kid who'd really appreciate the things he provided.

Nice fantasy, but it was never going to happen. Instead, I contented myself with the fact that I had a brother who could leap tall buildings at a single bound. In a way I hated him, but it made for a kind of good fantasy, too: a brother like a secret weapon who might come to your rescue, someday when he knew you existed, like a knight with a shining sword. Not that I was waiting around hoping; there was too much to do just to survive day to day. But it was a good thing to go to sleep with at night. It gave me something no other kid there had and I held onto that.

The older I got, the more the old man told me, a little at a time. Aliens would've been hard to swallow, but then he took me to Tunguska and I saw the black oil for myself, and what it did to a man. Ate lunch afterward with the bigwigs--real food, not the slop we got at the orphanage--meat and everything--but I ended up throwing it all up; I couldn't keep from imagining little black worms crawling around on my plate. If the old man meant for it to shake me up bad, he got his wish. I was eleven at the time.

When I was twelve they took a group of us bigger kids on a mountain hike. In reality, it was a test to see who the strong ones were. I was first to the top with almost a quarter mile to spare. After that, they started giving me a little more responsibility. They let me go into the town to pick up supplies. Mulder'd just started college. At thirteen I gave away my virginity to Lena, the town whore-in-training. She was a nice kid, a little slow in the head but she treated me like a real person. Six months later they found her on a roadside one early morning, frozen to death. She'd been beaten and raped. She was fourteen. Shook me up in spite of everything. Those were the markers of my young life.

At fifteen the old man sent me to a military camp. I spent the first year as errand boy, cleaning officers quarters and then weapons, learning what each was and how to break it down and put it back together and what it was used for. The officers I worked for treated me like shit at first. I had a hidden card to play if I needed it--the old man's leverage--but I wanted to make my own success. I started bringing them bits of information I'd picked up by keeping my ears open and eventually they realized I was worth having on their side, and we came to a truce. When I was sixteen they let me start training in earnest. Mulder was finishing up his B.A. and heading for Oxford.

By then I was beginning to seriously envy Mulder his privileged life. Or rather, the life he lived was beginning to seem incredibly naive to me, having so much handed to you without having to work for any of it. I didn't know about the way he'd taken Samantha's disappearance, the way it had fucked with his head and how things had gone at home for him afterward. I felt a little sorry for him about his dad, though--the coward who'd nearly sabotaged the Project, our hope for a future, and then had slunk off like a common village drunk to sit somewhere in the shadows, clutching his bottle. 

I didn't obsess over any of this stuff; it was just a backbeat inside my head because I was busy learning. One thing I'd figured out: if you were good at what you did, you were going to move up. You could get power one way or the other and that meant fewer people telling you what to do. I learned to make connections, to keep secrets that were more valuable not known and to expose the ones that mattered. AFter a while nobody asked where I grew up. Nobody laughed. I was my performance, and I was determined to make it the best I could, to have it carry me right on out of this backwater and on to bigger things. Sure, I was going to have to claw my way up the ladder past guys whose rank had been bought, not earned. But smart'll outdo rich stupidity every time. 

My efforts did bring me some notice. The old man claimed to be impressed. He told me what I needed next was experience under fire. Seeing things first-hand, I'd learn a lot. But I'd seen the guys who came back from Afghanistan, and I'd heard the stories. It was common knowledge: the way families who could afford it paid their sons' way out, and how over half the men who went ended up sick with hepatitis or malaria or dysentery. It had been a losing effort for years but the bureaucrats were too busy saving their political asses to call a retreat. 

It didn't make much sense, that going there could help me. For the first time I was broadsided by the realization that the old man's agenda wasn't about me at all. If I survived--that was the part he never came out and said--then I'd be hardened, experienced, sharp. The kind of tool he was looking for. And if I didn't... Well, it was pretty obvious that I was expendable, even after all the years he'd put into me. 

My time in the field could have been worse, though. I was 'spetsnaz'--special forces. We got better equipment and better food, such as it was: boots you could actually climb in, backpacks that distributed a load. I was 'sheltered' again, the way I had been growing up, though few men knew. The old man wanted me kept out of the worst of the danger, but you can't escape danger in a war zone. I was a sniper and I got my practice, all right--on old turbaned guerillas, tough young men, resistance leaders or even my occasional countryman in the middle of gunning down old village men and women. I got that they were pissed about losing their friends and that it was payback, but there's got to be a limit somewhere. Let your instincts take over completely and everything goes to hell. 

Sometimes it's surprising to find out where your limits are, if you've got any left at all. One time I came back into camp to find a bunch of guys waiting in line for their turn at a local woman they'd tied to a couple of crates. I barely stopped to think; I aimed my weapon and put a bullet in the back of her head from a good eighty meters. Scared the shit out of the guy who'd just stepped up. Don't know if it was her screams; maybe she reminded me of Lena. I just stood there, shaking inside, and nobody said a word. For a minute I thought they were going to jump me, but then they all backed away. They kept their distance after that. They would've killed her when they were finished anyway, and what kind of life would she have had if she'd lived? I'd seen the look on women like that before. They were barely more than ghosts.

The old man had come before I left for the fighting, to give me a pep talk and to bring me American vaccines nobody else had access to. So I managed to make it four months without getting seriously sick and I was only hit once, grazed near the shoulder and it healed up okay. Then the old man said the word and they pulled me. Flew me out and the old man met me in Tashkent--posh hotel, plenty of food. It was the obscene after what I'd come from. Spent a lot of time soaking in a hot bath and dreaming about some fantasy woman I wasn't even going to try looking for with the old man around. But I managed to keep my head the best I could. Inside, I was a mess like anybody else suddenly pulled from combat, but I put on my best sane face and told him I wanted to learn more about the vaccine program outside Krasnoyarsk, that I could work myself in in whatever capacity and be his eyes and ears. And he bought it. It was just what he wanted to hear.

So Mulder was at Oxford and I was the old man's mole; at least, he thought I was. But I was starting to realize that his great crusade to save the planet might be just as full of shit as the war I'd been a part of--politicians and generals climbing a career ladder back in Moscow with their Mercedes and their women and their big apartments while poor boys and poor men got sick or shot or drank themselves to death over the pointlessness of a stupid political war. There was one important difference, though: There was going to be another war coming, one that'd make Afghanistan look like a backyard brawl. And I wasn't going to let myself get lost in that, not for the sake of anyone's bureaucracy. The only way to keep from getting flushed down the drain was to look out for yourself, and I was going to make sure that I did.

When I got to Krasnoyarsk they set me up as a lab assistant, a position where it was easy to tap into the progress of the vaccine project. I didn't have any background, but it was common enough practice for someone to buy a position for themselves or a relative. They taught me what I needed to know, and I stayed eager and hung around the right circles so I knew what progress the research was making. That was where I met Maria Ivanova. She was always working. She'd even sit around on her break with a pad of paper and a pencil, doing calculations while her coffee got cold. There was some kind of bureaucratic mess-up with funding for the vaccine project and things weren't moving fast enough for her. Her husband was one of the ones in charge; I think that was strategic to her when she married him. Anyway, they argued more and more and finally the breakup came. But her ex-husband wasn't going anywhere; he was part of the system. So the move was hers. The rest of them tried to act like it didn't make any difference that she was leaving, but it was obvious that the work went downhill after that. Ivanova was smart and self-confident and she got what she wanted one way or the other. She didn't let anybody walk over her and I liked that. There was also this thing in the back of my head; I knew what had happened to her parents and I guess it tied into my own horror as a kid at seeing the black oil take a man over. For her, fighting this battle was no abstraction, and I understood what that was like.

After a while my cover job started to grate on me. Especially after my time in the war, I figured I had better things to do than clean flasks and petri dishes and hang around waiting to hear about the latest infighting. Maria and I traded a few comments in the cafeteria, enough for both of us to realize we had something in common: we were in this for ourselves, not for the greater glory of the program. Then one afternoon she left me a note and I met her in a park after hours. She said she was thinking about leaving and I said I knew about other programs--vaccine research--and I'd tell her if she told me more about the status of the work she'd been doing. So we swapped information, but she was hitting on me, too. Looking back, I think it was a just a test to see how I'd react, a maze for the lab rat to run. Maybe she'd be able to tell whether I was a promising candidate for her next lap dog. But I fell for it. Hell, I hadn't been with a woman in ages and if she was offering, who was I to say no? But it turned out bad. I don't play lap dog. We both went away mad--too much of ourselves exposed and nothing gained for the effort. She left a week or so later, said something about a teaching position in Leningrad.

I could see that bureaucracy was going to kill this project's potential, so I figured it was time to move to higher ground. There was vaccine research going on in the U.S. but my English was poor and I needed some time for myself. I mean, I'd lived my whole life for the old man, a piece of clay he could press his stamp into, and I'd gone straight from Afghanistan to Krasnoyarsk because I was afraid of what he might have thought up for me after that. It was a pre-emptive strike, taking the reins into my own hands. As much as I could without making it obvious, anyway. But I'd been eight months in Krasnoyarsk and I felt like I was I was treading water.  Or like I was caught in a loop that could keep running forever. 

So I told the old man I wanted some time, that the Russian research was on hold and I wanted to learn something about diplomacy. Diplomacy could come in handy... or at least, it would sound good to the old man. I'd made a few connections in Moscow through a commander I'd known before the war, a guy who'd learned perfect English just for the challenge of it and who'd always ribbed me about my poor accent. So I went to see this guy Petrovich, ex-military, and he put me in touch with an American businessman's wife, former school teacher, who helped me work on my English--Mrs. Brandt. She was a stickler, gray hair in a bun and never a single strand out of place, but it was a good thing. After a while I'd go places American ex-pats hung out and I could pass myself off as being from Denver or San Francisco.

Then Petrovich told me about this group he had going to Spain. They were supposed to interview some old Civil War veterans and I thought what the hell, they might have something useful to say and it was someplace new--someplace sunny and with beaches and a whole different way of life. Sounded like vacation, and when had I ever had one of those? Reminded me of the old man's stories when I was a kid, of Mulder at summer camp. Why didn't I deserve that, too?

Our group spent two months going from place to place, down the Mediterranean coast and then inland heading north, talking to old men and hearing their stories, taping them for Petrovich's project. And then in León I met Victor in a bar. We'd both had too much to drink and he was loud and funny and I was sitting there in the shadows as usual, but we bumped into each other and started talking and swapping stories. Victor had this picture of himself as a revolutionary of sorts--a freedom fighter--but in the end the only one he was trying to liberate was himself. He was the bastard son of a rich landowner, living in the shadow of his legitimate brothers, and I guess that gave us something in common. I'd never been the loud or funny type.  Maybe I was trying to figure out what made him tick, but he was an interesting guy.

He was good at coming up with women, too, and by the time the group was ready to move on, I'd had my fill of old men and their stories.  I'd caught Victor's bug and just wanted to loosen up--for a little while, anyway--and he'd offered to show me around. He had a little allowance from his father, hush money, and between that and my five-finger discount, we spent a couple of months floating around the country, seeing the sights and hanging out, going to discos and trying our best lines on pretty tourists, because Victor was right about the locals: you couldn't get to first base with them. Scandinavians and Americans were a different story, but I learned pretty quickly not to say I was from New York or L.A. or San Francisco; it was too easy to come up with someone who actually knew those places. Eventually the novelty started to wear off and Victor and I decided to go north, to France.

I knew the old man was going to go crazy, wondering where I was and if his investment had run away. But he probably knew he had me hooked, too. Behind everything like a backbeat, always sitting there where the food and the wine and the scenery and the occasional women couldn't block it out, was the picture I could never quite get out of my head of the black oil taking over that thin skeleton of a man, and the knowledge that invasion was hanging over us all. I was living on borrowed time.

I started getting antsy. For as much as we had in common, Victor wasn't like me; he wanted nothing more than to grab the kind of life for himself that he thought he had coming, but he wasn't his brothers and he never would be. He needed to take a clear look at himself, and whether he ever would have or not I'll never know, because about that time we stole a watch and a billfold from the wrong car and ended up being ambushed by a couple of mob types just as we came out of a restaurant with full stomachs. Five minutes later Victor was past tense, bleeding out of a head wound between overturned apple crates in an alley.  I hid under a produce cart for an hour, shaking, then slipped away and out of the city.

It was my wake-up call. I went back to Moscow and Petrovich and he assigned me to a little embassy spying. It sounded useful enough to the old man and I learned a lot about gathering information. I stayed with it for two years, and toward the end of 1988, he sent me to the Russian embassy in Prague. It was at a big political gala that I met Ché. He was a hacker, barely seventeen and with this thin, fragile face that could have been either young or old.  The local politicos were after him for breaking into their files. He had this dream of going to America, and I guess I figured I was going to need an ally when I got there; I knew I'd end up there eventually. So I found out a little more about what he could do, and I talked to some contacts I had where I worked, who talked to somebody who got him a passport and a visa to go to D.C. and work in the Russian Embassy there. I knew he wouldn't stay with them; he had his opinion of the Russian bear. Ché's slogan was 'for the people', and to him that meant little people, people with no influence--everyday people. Ché's the true revolutionary in the end. Staged revolts always leave the little guy in the dirt; they get caught up in their own flash and importance.

It made me focus more on America, sending Ché over. The old man was starting to worry about Mulder by then. Mulder'd been through the academy and had just earned his first gold star with that Monty Props capture. But now the old man started to let on to how much Samantha's disappearance had affected him. I think he was afraid Mulder might try to use Bureau resources to check out the files on her, that he might find something out of order and start looking into it himself. So I pressed the old man a little about coming over; maybe there was something I could do to help out. He was impressed with my English--that I'd done that at my own initiative--and he brought me to Virginia and set me up as a stable hand at a horse farm.

I wanted more. I was pretty pissed at first, stuck in another 'apprenticeship' like the one I'd had when I was fifteen, but I figured I'd make the best use of what I had in front of me. After a month or so I realized that the woman who came so often to ride or to stay for a week at a time, Dr. Charne-Sayer, was a medical researcher. Actually, it was a lucky break. I'd kept in contact with Ché and he came down one Saturday; he was the one who recognized her. And then I realized I was onto something bigger. They were milking her for information even though she didn't know it and the old man had put me there to see if I'd figure it out.

There was a Brit who came around, Charne-Sayer's lover, and I figured out how he fit in, too. A couple of times the old man even came to talk to him, though I kept myself in the shadows. I let it go on for a while, keeping records of what I'd found out... though not everything. I knew even then I'd just be shooting myself in the foot by showing I had what it took to compete with the old man. Then, when the time seemed right, I gave him what I'd gathered and it worked. He was impressed. He told me I was ready for the next step.

The old man didn't have much to say about Mulder in those days. He was working for the VCS, but he'd undergone regression hypnosis by then; I'd had Ché keep track of him. I guess it was the residue of that little-boy fantasy--the brother thing. Sometimes I'd think about what it'd be like if we ever met. What would he think of me? Would he have some sense that would tell him there was a connection between us? Idle speculation--the residue of a kid's dream--but it stuck with me anyway. I'd gotten the feeling the old man wanted to keep us apart, though. Then he sent me to L.A.--Malibu--to infiltrate a biotech company. I was supposed to snoop on some research they were doing. But then it turned out one of the execs was a hacker in his spare time and he'd stumbled across the movement of Project medical supplies headed for the train car researchers. He'd end up being my first hit for the old man.

Harrison rode dirt bikes in his spare time. I figured out his schedule and took him out in the dry December hills just off Mulholland one Saturday afternoon. Could've easily been an accident, some teenager out for target practice whose bullet went farther than he thought. But it took me three shots. And I was acutely aware that this wasn't any war zone. There were million-dollar American homes tucked away in the hills and I was nervous as hell. My first two shots were wide and by the time I'd squeezed off the third, he'd moved farther away, but I nailed him. It hit me as soon as I saw him fall: this was America and I was a wanted man now. They were going to be looking for me.

There'd never really been any consequences before; I'd been protected by the old man or by the fact that it was war, or by the long shadow arm of the Russian military. I could hardly sleep for two nights thinking about what I'd done. I even went back and watched them check out the crime scene looking to see if they'd recover my first two bullets, but they never did. The old man called me to congratulate me and I said what now? And he said stay; it'll look suspicious if you disappear. 

So I did, for another couple of months, but it wore on me; I wanted out of there. In my spare time I'd go sit on the beach and just stare out at the water. It was only going to get worse from here. The old man's assignments were going to dig me in deeper and deeper, but I couldn't see any way out. Go off on my own and what? Sit around with a beer and a remote in my hand until the ships came screaming down from the sky and we were all taken over by the Oil? There was no way to block out that vision, to walk away and have any kind of normal life.

For a while I'd had as normal a life as I'm probably ever going to get, though, that six months I was with CalEmergent. Had an apartment, clothes, even a motorcycle. I actually had a suit and tie hanging in my closet. Had a girl for a couple of those months.

There were women everywhere you looked--available women, not girls hidden behind half a dozen suspicious relatives--but most of them had something to do, someplace they were going. They didn't have time for a guy who didn't open up, and I'd never been a talker. It wasn't me and anyway, it could be deadly in my line of work, letting out enough that people would remember you, dropping details they could use to trace you. So pretty soon they were out of there--the ones with big plans--and that left those without. But most of that batch wanted you to talk, too.

And then I met Patty in the grocery store. I literally ran into her, not looking where I was going, my mind caught up in the ins and outs of the old man's larger scheme. We had one of those awkward scenes you see in movies, and somehow it led to drinks and small talk and then back to her place. I think she was lonely, mostly, and having somebody to lay there holding her was worth going ahead and getting undressed for. I spent the night and left in the morning before she woke up, but by that afternoon--it was a Saturday--I found myself back on her doorstep and she was glad to see me. We ate dinner and drove up the coast on my bike, sat and watched the breaking waves fluoresce in the darkness and went back to her place again.

Patty'd come from Iowa, just wanting to make her getaway from corn country, but she was never headed toward the glitz of Hollywood. All she wanted was an opportunity to make a life of her own away from the long family shadow of her basketball-playing brothers. She was a receptionist at a place that sold paper products, and she was a little overweight and on the quiet side, but she also wasn't out to trick me; she was sincere and that counted for something--a lot, actually, because the last woman I'd been with in Russia had been sent to spy on me.

Anyway, I got to where I'd find myself on Patty's doorstep every Friday afternoon and she'd open that door with one of her big smiles, like I was a total surprise--a welcome one--and we'd spend the weekend together. It was good practice for playing the American. She'd cook me common American foodss like macaroni and cheese or strawberry shortcake--she made that for my birthday--and I'd have to think on my feet, come up with a quick answer for something I'd never anticipated, like was I used to having the strawberries sliced or crushed? We didn't go out much--not anywhere I might be spotted. We'd go hiking in the hills sometimes, or we'd rent movies and eat ice cream and then end up in bed. She never pushed me by asking too much; I think she was afraid I might go away. But it was nice--a nice lull in my crazy life, the kind of thing you look back at later and don't regret. I admired her spirit, too. Patty was starting at the bottom but she was saving up money to go to school on the side. She was the type who'd do a solid job at whatever she put her mind to.

When I started thinking about going to her place mid-week, I knew I was in trouble. And by then I had the hit to plan. So I'd do that, go riding up off Mulholland after work, and on weekends if Patty suggested a drive, I'd make sure it wasn't there. Must have been getting quieter than usual, too, because she noticed my mood, though she didn't say much. Probably thought it was something she'd done, but I said it was just work, things were dragging there and I was thinking of heading for Portland or Seattle; I knew I'd have to leave eventually and I might as well lay the groundwork.

The day I shot Harrison I told myself I was going to stay away, and I did for a while. But I couldn't sleep. I was a mess and by midnight I was at her door again. She'd already gone to bed and was half out of it, but it was probably better that way. We just went to bed and she cried against my shoulder without making any noise and I just held her and let her hold me. If she'd known what I'd done, she'd have taken off and gotten as far away from me as she could. The next day was awkward. Both of us could see the end coming, and I told her I was flying to Portland the following weekend to go job-hunting.

I didn't go back after that. I wanted to; that was what scared me the most. I couldn't afford to be sentimental. Still, I couldn't help but feel bad for her. It was going to hurt her, my leaving. I'd always been a believer in sink or swim. Rough times shook out the weak from the strong; there was a reason for it. But Patty deserved better.

Finally ended up leaving a note on her doorstep with a bouquet of flowers. I switched markets, took to shopping in another neighborhood so I wouldn't run into her. Six weeks later the old man sent me a plane ticket and I was on my way north to the Sacramento area. He wanted me to go to a bunch of little towns looking for death records of John or Jane Doe minors in the late seventies. It was a weird assignment but I knew the old man didn't do anything without a reason. Spent a week or so, checked every little wayside town in Sacramento and Placer counties. One thing I noticed: Every place I was supposed to check was within a 25 mile radius of McClellan Air Force Base. In the end I didn't find anything that stood out, or a pattern. So I took what information I'd gathered and headed back to D.C.

The old man had always had something glowing to say about Mulder before, something meant to set me off a little or make me feel the need to compete, but not this time. He was having a hard time trying to figure out where to ship me off to next, and in the meantime I did a little investigating of my own with Che's help and found out that Mulder played basketball on Wednesday afternoons, just pickup games at a park. So I went there, sat there sweaty-palmed and watched. I'd seen a few pictures of him when I was little, but I had to have Ché pull me a picture from the DMV database so I'd know what he looked like now. He was a good ballplayer, held his own with the best of them. He looked like he was close to my height, give or take an inch, and when he sat down to take a break he seemed to get lost in thought, as if the scene around him had disappeared. He didn't bother to look around and check the area for anything standout the way I would have, but then he'd probably never been on the run from anybody. He never even saw me.

Found a few places where FBI agents hung out and I listened to the talk there. Mulder had a reputation, all right, partly as the crack profiler the old man had said he was and partly as a crackpot. Seems he'd gotten the idea his sister had been abducted by aliens and he wasn't afraid to talk about it, which was pretty stupid, actually.  Not the part about believing, but letting other people know it was what he thought. My estimation of him took a nosedive then. You don't give yourself away like that. He didn't seem to care what people thought of him, and it occurred to me that this could be part of the reason the old man had suddenly shut up about him. It hadn't passed me by, either--that assignment he'd given me out in Sacramento. Child Jane or John Does. Maybe he was afraid of Mulder looking for Samantha and stumbling across something vital. The old man had said she'd been taken. He'd said others were taken, probably adults as well as kids, but he'd said kids to impress me at the time.

But it didn't mean they hadn't been returned. Or he could have lied to me. The group was experimenting on people, trying to make hybrids. The old man had mentioned it in passing, though I'd discovered more details from Petrovich, who had his sources. They had to be keeping them somewhere, and kids could be just as useful as adults; so often kids can put up with more before they give out. It gave me a chill to think about it, not that he might have used my sister--she was nothing but a name to me--but how expendable she was. How expendable I was. The fact that he had offspring meant nothing to the old man; it just made us convenient tools or weapons. It made me realize I was going to need more in reserve for the future than just the old man's reassurances. Talk was cheap.

Looking back, I think the old man realized exactly what Mulder would do given the ability to investigate his sister's disappearance, and that he could easily get out of line. Maybe he'd planned all along to partner me with Mulder to keep him reigned in, or maybe he wanted me waiting in the wings just in case. Better safe than sorry. At any rate, he enrolled me at UVa. Spent almost two years studying political science and history, a lot of which wouldn't be worth the paper the textbooks were printed on in the real world; I knew that from my experience in the field. It was a role, being a student. Like everything else. I'd made it through cleaning weapons and cleaning stables; I could do this, too. 

So I went to lectures and did a little studying, but it made me antsy, sitting around reading a bunch of boring texts by people who hadn't lived the stuff--the power and the crises and the intrigues and the wars. If my test scores dipped too far Ché'd hack in and bump them up a notch or two. But in my spare time I wasn't letting any grass grow. There were a few jobs for the old man--some domestic, others out of the country--people who were double-crossing the Syndicate or keeping their financing operations from feeding cash into the Project. And I traded favors with Petrovich; I took it slowly, but I started to find out details of the hybrid programs--about the German scientists and the Japanese and the failed hybrids buried in New Mexico. And the coldest twist of all--the fact that they were working on the old man's wife. In his own twisted way he probably felt like he was doing something patriotic, sacrificing her like that.

Mulder was starting to really push the limit, and the old man's response was to put X-files in his way where he'd trip over them. Mulder took the bait. Only he took it a little too far. He might be naive, but he was determined; I had to give him that. So then the strategy was to put the brakes on Mulder by pairing him with someone who wouldn't buy his theories. But you know how well that worked. Scully saw something in him--I think they saw something in each other--and though she wasn't about to give an inch when his theories were out in the stratosphere, in the end she disciplined him, which made him more effective at the Bureau instead of less.

When the old man's plan for Scully didn't work out, he pulled me from UVa, manufactured a degree and got me into the Academy. I was going to get a shot at managing Mulder myself and it made me nervous as hell. Probably it was the residue of that kid thing I'd carried with me for years. I was going to have to keep Mulder in line, but at the same time I wanted him to be something to me, or at least, I was hoping he might be. The old man had never felt like family; he was more like my handler. So I spent four months going through 12-hour-a-day training at the Academy, working to keep up with the academics, trying even harder not to look as competent as I was with a weapon, or reacting to those impromptu situations they're always staging for you. Anyway, I made it through just fine. By then the old man'd had the X-files closed, but I guess he knew Mulder's stubbornness pretty well, and I was going to have to be the one to keep his nose out of where it wasn't supposed to be.

I don't think I slept more than an hour the night before that first day playing his partner. I could see now how the old man had built up my attitude toward Mulder over the years. I knew the stakes; I knew Mulder had to be kept from exposing the Project, but that other part of me still wanted this partnership to turn out to be something real. So there I was, Double Agent Krycek, walking through that room, heart in my throat, coming up to his desk-- _his_  desk--and freezing. But I made myself go on. Put on my best face, gave him my line about the case being mine first. And he didn't have the time of day for me. If I'd been wearing a sign around my neck that said 'I am your brother', I don't think he would have noticed.

Mulder knew what he wanted and he was going to do it his way. Well, I wasn't going to let it drop that easily, so I pushed back and he gave in... or at least, he let me think he had. That was when he ditched me. He was self-centered, a prima donna. No, a fool: you've got to look beyond your own ego in this business if you expect to stay alive. But when I finally caught up with him, I started to see how he worked, and he was good. He was incredibly intuitive, had a feel for clues the way a safecracker has a feel for the dial under his fingertips. He saw through Cole at the end, that's for sure. It sure as hell was more than I was able to do. And Scully, when we caught up with her--there was definitely something about the way they worked together, where only half if it had to be spoken and the rest was understood, like the communication between a good horse and rider.

Well, I did exactly what I was supposed to do, gave perfect reports to the old man, and though I was pissed about Mulder treating me like a nobody, by the time we started the next case he seemed to be softening. He actually acted like I was human, but then it was off to that hostage negotiation with Duane Barry, and Mulder was busy. This time it was everybody else who treated me like a non-person. I stood there watching Mulder talk to this crazed man, trying to figure out whether or not his determination and his commitment overrode his stupidity in the end. I mean, everything he was, he telegraphed to everyone in the room; he may as well have had it printed on the front of his shirt. If they're going to stop you, Mulder, you don't go telling them what you think, or what you're going to do. You keep your mouth shut, you play the good little agent, and when you've got them lulled and they're not looking, you do what you have to. How long would Mulder have lasted where I'd been, in Russia or Afghanistan? Still, he had guts going into the travel agency like that. Barry could have freaked and it could've been a bloodbath, everyone wasted. Mulder went because he believed. He went because he had to know what Duane Barry might know about his sister, even if it got him killed. And he did a damn good job of handling Barry in the end.

He did too good a job for the old man. And since Scully'd stepped in to help Mulder again, the old man decided it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. So he tipped Barry to Scully's location, gave him some story about the aliens wanting her real bad, that if he took her, they'd bypass him for her, and he took the bait. And Mulder, he lost his head. Any logic he had flew right out the window. You gotta figure you'll be fresher, and think better, if you get some sleep. Not Mulder; he'd probably see it as a measure of his lack of commitment to his ex-partner. Nearly drove us off the road to prove that commitment, and then he tried covering for what he'd done, insisted he was okay. Right. Self-delusion--one of this world's great killers. Not only could he not see his limitations, he wasn't even interested. He tried ordering me around again up in the lodge, but by then I was sick of his shit and I let him know I wasn't going to take any more of it. Of course, at that point Barry was on his way out and I had to get out of there, because it was all too obvious who'd been the last one in the room with Barry, and who'd been in the control room with the tram operator.

So I'd spent some time with my brother after all these years. I'd saved his ass by starting that tram up again before he could climb high enough to electrocute himself, and he still knew nothing about who I was. It had been one big bust, like a helium balloon that pops as soon as you finally get close enough to touch it. I was mad at Mulder for being such a prick, and I was mad at myself for having had hopes that we could be something in the first place. And I was mad at the old man. I'd figured he was finally on the verge of letting me into the club, but the first time I asked for information he slammed my nose in the door. No rights, only orders to be carried out.

I was destined to be his mule for life.

Not if I could help it.

But it seemed to be what the old man had in mind. After that it was Project security--train schedules and bringing scientists in and out, coordinating, gathering evidence on what they did in their off-hours. Then six months later he called me in and told me he had an important security leak. Turned out to be Bill Mulder; he'd had regrets and was about to spill his guts to Mulder about the Project and his part in it. Wasn't hard to pull that one off. The guy was sloshed half the time anyway, which didn't make him any too alert, and I'd had issues with this man all my life. He was the guy who hadn't wanted me in his house, the reason I'd grown up in a cement compound with radiators that heated about an inch from the wall. He was the reason I was a guy hiding in his shower stall instead of someone like Mulder with his Oxford degree. 

Or so I told myself to psyche myself up. Unfortunately, Mulder showed up like a stray dog who won't go away. He must have seen me going out that window, or behind the house, because when I got to his apartment building to swap out the water softener canister, he spotted me and nearly killed me. Would have, if Scully hadn't shot him. At least somebody was thinking on their feet. But he got his chance to wail away on me. Except for the fact that it hurt, I could've laughed: there was Mulder raining his emotions down on me like my own personal storm cloud. But when I thought about it later, he had a point.  A right: I'd killed his father, a man he'd cared about for whatever reason. Unlike me. If somebody'd shot the old man, I probably would've bought them a drink.

As usual, though, Scully went too far, swooping down to pluck Mulder out of danger and then depositing him right on top of the train car holding the evidence of the first hybrid failures. She became my next assignment, but I had a new guy tagging along, the old man's latest lap dog, Cardenal. He had a little too much of that flare-up, anarchistic thing that's part of his culture, and nothing works in this business like subtlety. So we went and set up in Scully's apartment and waited. But when the door opened, it wasn't Scully at all; it was another woman. I always double-check my target, but Cardenal was jittery. He fired before she'd even managed to hit the light switch and the damage was done. All I can say is I'd played this scene out in my head a dozen times before we went in, and what finally happened just didn't compute. I guess I was in shock because the only thing I could think to do was to get the hell out of there, to put some distance between us and this mistake. Which was a stupid move because now they knew we were after Scully. We might as well have taken out a full-page ad in the Washington Post.

The old man and I had words. There was no way to put a good spin on what had happened, but if he hadn't given me a nervous shit like Cardenal to babysit, there wouldn't have been a problem in the first place. He wanted me to take responsibility for Cardenal but I wasn't about to bend over and kiss the old man's ass when I hadn't wanted Cardenal along in the first place. Might've been smart, though, looking back. Puckering up, that is.  The syndicate was giving the old man a hard time about the mistake, and the fact was we should never have left Scully's apartment without that body. If Scully's sister had just disappeared, there would've been no evidence pointing to us or our intentions. 

But at the time I felt like I'd lost too much ground already to give up any more. After Duane Barry I'd been given nothing but surveillance and muscle jobs. I'd been waiting all my life to break into the inner circle and It was pretty obvious I hadn't been on any fast track lately. I wasn't about to let this thing with Melissa Scully sink my chances completely.

But going head-to-head with the old man... I was young. Looking back, I should've known better. And I should have suspected something when his mood seemed to lighten. If nothing else, the fact that he assigned three of us to retrieve the DAT tape, not two, should have set off alarm bells. But I was focused on the tape itself, and on strategy. So we set off to shadow Skinner and caught up with him in the hospital stairwell. Once I had that tape we were out of there in a hurry and I have to admit my mind wasn't on the bigger plan, on whether the project would be safe now from any one of a dozen groups out to prove that aliens had come to this planet. I was hoping what I had in my pocket was the Holy Grail, that delivering this tape would get me out of the doghouse once and for all and send me back up to where I should be. 

And then we stopped at a convenience store. I don't know whether it was Cardenal's delivery when he said he could use a beer or the fact that I just happened to glance toward the door and see them both looking back at me. My mind froze; I knew it was the old man sending me off. But my body reacted in time and got me the hell out of there. Just barely, anyway. Took off on foot, but I twisted my ankle when the blast knocked me over, and I didn't make it very far before I couldn't go on. Managed to make it into a little diner and use the phone. I called Ché, the only guy I could think of who'd help me, and waited over an hour till he was able to borrow a car from a friend and come pick me up. Spent the whole time shaking. If they'd done a door-to-door, I would've been history.

So there it was: I was out, crumpled up and thrown away like a piece of unread junk mail. No matter the twenty-seven years of prepping me, sending me here and there to gain experience, even college time and the Academy. He'd never take anybody standing up to him. Hell, I even rated lower than that stupid fuck Cardenal who couldn't control his trigger finger. But then Cardenal knew how to bow and scrape. I'd always figured I'd earned some rights, letting the old man lay out practically every step I'd ever taken. Hell, I wasn't just somebody he'd hired off the street. But I guess the shared genes didn't count for much. He'd said as much already, after Scully was taken: no rights, only orders to be carried out. And his wrinkled ass to kiss for the privilege.

Spent a week at Ché's recovering, putting up with his efforts to mother me and his worry over my silence. Inside I was boiling mad, but more than that I was scared shitless. All my life I'd been primed for the invasion and for being one of the few to have a fighting chance in spite of the odds. Now I was locked out, the danger bearing down on us, me outside screaming and pounding on a cement door and nobody on the other side who was going to listen. If they heard anything at all, they were probably laughing.

But I took the lesson. I wouldn't make the same mistake again--let anybody control me the way the old man had. I thought about my sister, too--how he'd had no regard for her, either, whoever she was, aside from her easy availability as a lab rat. If what I'd assumed was true. And then I thought of Mulder--naive, idealistic Mulder, the guy who'd had life so easy there wasn't a scar on his body. He didn't know any of this, about colonization or hybrids. All he knew was the sister he'd grown up with had been taken by little green men and he was ready to throw his career out the window to find her. If it meant losing his position and sitting out in the gutter, he'd do it. I didn't get it. Nobody I'd ever known had been worth that kind of commitment. He was a dreamer and my mind condemned his lack of practicality. My gut, though, it envied him his conviction just the same.

I knew I needed to get myself out of the country but I wasn't leaving empty-handed. I had the DAT tape. It was everything I had now--my protection, my resource, my bank account--and I was going to make it work for me. Me alone. I knew I couldn't go back to Russia safely; it'd be too obvious a place for the old man to look, and he had his connections there. So when my ankle was better, I headed for Canada. Some information I'd gotten through one of Petrovich's sources indicated there was some kind of pre-colonization groundwork being laid in Alberta and I needed to find out what it was.

\--------------------

SCENE: DEEP WATER

_Four years before he's partnered with Mulder, a 23-year-old Alex Krycek, six months into life in the U.S., is sent to surveille a potential enemy of the Project. But what sends him into deep water is a simple meeting with a girl in a supermarket._

 

I guess the moral of this story is 'watch where you walk'.   
  
But that would imply that I wished I could take back what happened.

*~*~*~*~*

L.A. was a trip: urban sprawl, the beach, gridlock. That Hollywood aura. You knew they were around--rich celebrities, movie and TV stars, and there were wannabes everywhere you looked, most of them waiting for the lucky break that was never going to come. But the energy--the anticipation--of the place was real. And there I was, finally on my own in America: traffic tickets, overloaded grocery stores, girls who were everywhere on their own and obviously not going home to apartments full of wary relatives. I had an apartment in Santa Monica, a motorcycle, and a job playing lab gofer while I spied on a research exec the old men were worried about. A hit to pull off if they decided Ross Harrison was the kind of threat they figured him for.

It didn't look that way after a while, though, and keeping tabs on Harrison had started to get to me. I wanted to move on to an assignment that actually had some significance. I'd been waiting a long time for a chance to stop being a peasant--to wedge my way into the inner circle--and my patience was wearing thin. But the old man said to keep working. Keep watching.

And there was a certain pull to this capitalist craziness I was living, in the freedom you had to go out and do, and in the lack of restrictive traditions. The girls here were unpolished in comparison to Europeans but they had a kind of frontier resolve. Whatever it was they were aspiring to be--actresses or artists or businesswomen or some rich guy's wife--they figured they were going to get there. Which kind of left me as a Volkswagen among Mercedes. Sure, there were ordinary women, too, common girls working cash registers and answering phones. But I had no need for the baggage of a relationship and one-night stands get stale pretty fast. They can be a lot more effort than they're worth.

Then one day I walked into the grocery store and literally into this girl. Knocked a can of green beans right out of her hand. I'd had my head full trying to figure out how I could convince the old man to move me up out of the basement on the next assignment and I plowed right into Patty without even seeing her. Okay, it was worse than that; I stepped on her foot. Caught me so completely off-guard I picked up the can of green beans and apologized all over the place. 

I was kind of marooned after that and she smiled and we traded a little small talk. Then we went our separate ways, except that we'd parked next to each other and she made some comment, passing by on her way out, about my bike and we started talking again. She told me about riding on the back of her brother's motorcycle through cornfields and I don't know why it caught me; I was thinking I don't need anything here, and then I was thinking she might be easy. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was Friday afternoon and the work week had been a bitch and when Patty smiled, the lab and everything that had gone on there faded into the background. And she was still limping a little from where I'd stepped on her foot.

Anyway, the upshot was that we ended up on the patio of the little Mexican restaurant next door, drinking margaritas and trading small talk, and when we finally got up again, both of us loosened a little by the drinks, I gave her a hand up out of the chair--those awkward plastic ones with the arms that hook under the edge of the table if you're not careful--and neither of us was quite ready to let go. 

We were supposed to be heading back to the parking lot but that was going to end things pretty fast so I said something about a park down the block and she was perfectly willing to head that way with me. Patty wasn't exactly what you'd describe as a centerfold. She had her own look and was a little overweight but she was pretty in her own way and she wasn't one of those Barbie-wannabes who can't think any farther than hair and makeup. And she had this smile that was totally genuine. It was a relief after the little cloud I'd been living under. 

Not that I was thinking any of this stuff consciously. Biology kind of took over and by the time we got back to the parking lot, it was pretty obvious that she wasn't any more eager to break this up than I was. Another dozen steps to the car and it'd be curtains, though, so I was trying to think up something to say to string things out when she turns to me and asks do I like hot fudge sundaes? Okay, so it's not exactly 'come up and see my fish tank,' and she seems sincere enough about the hot fudge sauce she says she makes, but it's a foot in the door, too; nobody's really being fooled here. There's the little problem of having come here separately, but she says her place is only three blocks away and I say no problem, I can walk back for my bike later, and she looks kind of relieved and we both get into her car. 

It's one of those five-minute rides that seems to take half a lifetime, but finally we get there and park and take the groceries from the trunk. She works her key in the lock and leads the way inside, but the entry bulb is burned out and we go into the darkened kitchen and set the bags on the counter. 

No time like the present. Before she can reach all the way to the light switch I take her hand and bring her closer, and I kiss her. Carefully. She seems like the type who wants reassurance--you know, that I'm not just some crazed stranger out to take what I can get and then steal her TV and stereo on the way out. I have no interest in her stereo and TV. And I have no interest in being reported as a rapist, either. I hear women here do that sometimes.

This woman's mouth is all satin heat and curves, and her hands reach for my waist, but I can tell she's not in this for a quick session of hot-and-heavy. Though she's definitely open... opening... mmm... to being made love to. Somehow it doesn't bother me, taking my time, and I leave her mouth and drift a line of kisses to her jaw and down the side of her neck--she shivers--and end at her collarbone, which is as far I can get with this blouse buttoned. Her hands come up and cup my face; she wants my mouth again and I give it to her, our kisses deeper and hungrier this time. She tastes like the tang of margaritas and when I trail a finger down the front of her blouse she leans into me and I smile and slip open the top button and then another and another. She's not clawing at my clothes but she's not backing off, either, and there's no mistaking what her mouth is telling me. 

I ease back a moment. We look at each other and I can read it in her eyes--heat mixed with a flash of hurt, as if she thinks I might turn and walk out. But I'm not going anywhere. I come closer again and let her know. A minute later the blouse is gone, and then her bra, and her fingers have finally found their way up under my shirt hem and we're still standing beside the kitchen counter. 

"Somebody may get an eyeful if they're enterprising enough," I murmur, nodding toward the mostly-closed blinds in the window above the sink. 

She takes half a step back. Her head dips down. All of a sudden I'm sure I've blown it, broken the moment, and by now I'm starving for this. Finally she looks up, barely focused on me, her teeth pressing against her lower lip. Her cheeks are flushed. Her mouth opens a little and she shakes her head. I swallow.

"I just--"

It's over.

"I don't--" She shakes her head again. "I don't do this--meet men in the grocery store and..."

I try to keep my breathing even. "I usually watch where I'm going. You're the first girl I've ever plowed into like that. Honest."

That much is true. She flashes just a hint of one of those smiles and looks down again. Maybe she needs a little space. I start to move back but she catches my hand.

"Don't go," she says. 

I let out more of a smile than I'd intended and we come back together again. One last kiss and she's got my hand, leading me upstairs to the bedroom. Outside, the wind's picked up and it's blowing the curtain in. She goes to shut the window, then the curtain, and I come up behind her in the dark. I smooth my hands over her shoulders and down her sides. 

"You're cold, you know," I say. It's October, after all, and the evenings are finally beginning to cool. 

She turns, catches my belt loops with two fingers. Looks up. She has beautiful breasts.

"Alex, do you have--" She looks down a moment. "You know, some--"

Protection? I reach into my back pocket, slip out my wallet and fish out a dog-eared foil packet. She seems relieved. 

"I'm clean," I say. "Don't worry." And it's true. I'm not stupid.

A moment later her hands are up under my shirt, smooth and light, spreading current that makes my breath hitch, and my shirt's going up, farther up and then over my head and off. Her arms go around me and she rests her forehead against my shoulder, her hair soft like a cloud between us.

"You okay?"

She nods, but it takes a second before she looks up. "I'll be back in a minute," she says, and glances toward the bed. "It's warmer in there. Go ahead." 

I watch as she goes into the bathroom and shuts the door. I don't know what the expression on her face meant. What if she changes her mind? I believe her when she says she's never picked up a stranger in the grocery story before... or probably anywhere else, for that matter; she doesn't seem like the type. So how did I luck out? 

I just hope she doesn't spend too much time thinking about it. 

A moment later I realize I'm still standing in the middle of the room. I make myself move, reach for the bedspread and pull it back. A worn teddy bear falls off the pillow. I set it on the nightstand, slip out of my pants and get inside the covers. The sheets are smooth and printed with little bouquets of flowers. I stare over at the strip of light under the bathroom door, then look away and close my eyes. The longer that light stays on, the slimmer my chances get. I'm aching for this but I try to talk myself into a holding pattern in case things go bad.

Just when I've convinced myself she's come to her senses, the strip of light disappears and the door opens. She hesitates for a second just outside the door, letting her eyes adjust, and then goes around to the far side of the bed without once looking up, as if she's in the room alone. She's wearing something dark green, a slip or chemise. At the side of the bed she stops and looks up at me, flushed.

"Hey," I say quietly, and when I hold back the covers she slips inside and I pull her up against me. She holds on for dear life and for a minute we just lay there, not moving, not saying anything. Then her chin comes up. I look down and our mouths meet and it all surges in; we're right back where we were before. 

The green thing is amazing, smooth and silky. I run my hands all over it and she's obviously enjoying what it does to her because before I know what's happening she's coaxing me on top of her and I'm starting to push inside. And still there's that little bit of reticence; I can see it in her face, feel it in the way her fingers press against my biceps. Down south, a last set of muscles is holding out. I think of something, just a little detail: she'd introduced herself as Pat. Could be boom or bust but I feel like a re-entry satellite going through atmospheric burn-up; I have to try something.

"Patty," I say, and there's something in her eyes, something vulnerable that shows for just a second, and I say it again, softly. "Patty."

And she smiles and pulls me closer and I push in--god, heaven--and start to build a rhythm. I try to keep my head but it's been so long and it feels so damn good that my mind shorts like a live wire falling into water and before I know it I'm past the point of holding back. I come, panting, and ease myself down against her, waiting to catch my breath. 

But when the endorphin rush clears I realize I'm right back where I was in the grocery store, stepping on her foot. This was supposed to be a party for two. She's going to expect something. Want something.

"Sorry about--" I look up, feeling the red in my face. 

She gives me a half-smile and a shrug and another look I can't read. After a minute I slip off to the side and we disconnect.

"Just give me a minute," I say. "Be right back." And I get up to go clean off.

The bathroom light's too bright and the water in the sink is too loud. I keep my eyes on what I'm doing and not on the mirror. She has pink towels and green, the color of ferns, and I take a green one to dry off with and remind myself to hang it again when I'm done. I have no idea what the look on her face meant. Not mad. Maybe a little disappointed or sad or... It's hard to tell, but then most of the time it is. Cultures are different but it's beyond that. Women always seem like they've come from some hidden place, as if they're a secret tribe. 

I remind myself she's waiting out there, and I flip off the light and open the door. Back in bed, I slip under the covers and reach across. Her hand catches mine. Something hitches inside me but I roll toward her.

"Didn't mean to get ahead of things there."

After a beat she shakes her head. "It's okay."

"Just... you know, tell me what--"

"It's okay." She shakes her head again.

"No, really, just--"

Her lips press together. She looks at me as if she's trying to figure out how far she trusts me. After a while I realize I'm holding my breath.

"What?"

"Can you--" Her teeth press against her lower lip. "Can you just hold me? For a while?"

I push up on one elbow. "You sure? That's all you--?"

She pauses and then nods. She can be incredibly serious and I can see that she'd be wondering how this ever happened.

"Yeah, sure." 

Small payment. I pull her into my arms. Her hand slips around my waist and she curls down against my chest. We just lay there, not talking, and finally I feel her sigh. 

"Your work week as bad as mine?" I say, and I run two fingers through the hair beside her temple.

"Yours was bad?"

"Boring. Frustrating sometimes. You know--office politics. The usual."

She doesn't say anything. I stare at a streak of light on the ceiling and finally look down at her again.

"Just... my family, I guess," she says now.  "I've been out here about eight months, on my own, and it gets--" She cuts off abruptly and eventually I feel a little wet spot on my skin next to her eye. I close my own. Lucky enough to score, but now I end the night playing therapist.

I don't say anything, I just hold her. 

It's what she asked for. 

*~*~*~*~*

Eventually I wake up and it surprises me: I hadn't figured I'd fall asleep at all. Patty's sound asleep but I'm alert now and this is as good a time as any to make my exit. Anyway, I'm not much at morning conversation. I slip out of bed, get dressed and, against my better judgment, nudge Patty's shoulder. 

"I've got to go," I say. "I left my bike in the parking lot and I don't want to wait too long--you know, go back and find it stripped."

She nods but she's obviously only barely awake.

I bite the inside of my lip. "Maybe we can go riding sometime." Just something to make it seem open-ended.

But I don't give her my number and she doesn't ask. Maybe she's too far gone to think straight. Or maybe she recognizes it for the line it is.

I lean over, kiss her cheek quickly and stand up. I'm to the doorway when I hear her voice, quiet.

"Be careful."

"Yeah," I say. "I will."  

Back at the market, my bike's fine. I take it home, shower, get in bed but I can't fall asleep. I lie there trying to think strategy and when I wake up again, it's because the sun's shining in my face; it's after eleven. I get up and wash my bike and polish all the chrome like the crazy capitalist I'm supposed to be playing, but the fact is I like it. I love this bike and I want it to look good. I'd like to go riding, too. It's a beautiful, clear day but the road that winds along the coast going north, the PCH, is going to be crowded with half of L.A. out for a taste of something that doesn't smack of a desk and a cubicle, so I figure I'll wait until later, just before sunset.

I spend nearly two hours working on the bike, and then I do my laundry and start organizing my space before I finally admit to myself that all the busywork is just an attempt to keep from thinking about Patty and it's not working. I want to go back. Maybe it's the sex and maybe it's the thought of getting a clear night's sleep. Who knows whether that was just a quirk, but I could use another night like that. I glance at the clock--3:17. 

By four I'm back on Patty's doorstep.

*~*~*~*~*

Eight weekends we played our little game, until the day I took out Harrison in the dry winter hills off Mulholland. We ate and rode my bike, hiked and watched old movies and made crazy love. She gave me the first birthday present anyone had ever given me. Sometimes we stepped on each other's toes... 

No, I guess that would be me. I'm not cut out for that kind of thing. 

After all these years, sometimes I still think about that.

\-------------------------

SCENE: THE ALBERTA COLONY

_On his way off the continent after the car bombing, Alex Krycek stops to investigate an intelligence tip he's received from a Russian source._

 

I spend the better part of a week looking, wandering down little empty lanes through grassy hills before I finally find the place. Or before he finds me. I've stopped by the roadside to check myself against the map for the twentieth time when he appears practically out of nowhere, striding toward me over a rise.

"Are you lost?" he says, but he's the one who looks out of place in his slacks and his tweed sport coat. He has that kindly-old-guy look but I can tell he's up to something.

So I say no, just checking out the scenery. But I'm not very convincing and we stand there eyeing each other for a while.

Finally he says, "Would you like me to show you, Mr. Krycek? It's not safe for you to wander around here on your own."

It's the flashing numbers all over again. Somehow the old man's followed me, or one of his goons has gotten to Ché, because he's the only one who knew where I was headed. I expect to see the old man step out smirking from behind a bush, or at least to smell the stench of his Morleys, but nothing happens--no old man, no sudden bullet ripping into me.  And then he says it again. Do I want him to show me?

By now my heart's running like a spooked rabbit. "Show me what?"

"What you came here to see."

"How the hell would you know what I came here for?"

He shrugs. "It's immaterial," he says. He's wearing this thin smile, too smug for my taste. "Do you want to see or don't you? You must be accompanied. Otherwise, you'll be vulnerable."

"To what? My guess is I'll be a lot more vulnerable on the guided tour."

"Others have tried it before--coming to this colony. Let me show you what happens to them." His hand comes out, an afterthought. "Jeremiah Smith."

I don't offer mine. Anyway, it's sweaty.

He turns and walks past a curve in the road and points to something behind a big rock. I swallow the crawling feeling in my gut and go over to where he is. Two bodies lie in the bushes, one not much more than a skeleton with flaps of dark skin hanging off it like old leather. The other's fresher; you can still see the guy's face and the welts on it.

"What happened to them?" I say.

"Bee stings," he says.

I laugh. "Yeah, right. I hear those killer bees have barely reached Arizona."

"They're not that kind of bee."

My worries about the old man are fading, but Smith is beginning to seriously piss me off with his Dalai Lama calm.

"I can show you," he repeats.

"Why would you want to? And how do you know who I am?"

"Who you are"--he shrugs--"I don't know much about. But I can read your thoughts. As a boy you were called Alyosha--short for Aleksei. You came here to see. Because you don't believe in it."

"Believe in what?"

"In what will come. You want to see it stopped."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He turns away as if he's leaving and starts into the grass the way he came.

Make the leap or not? But my whole life's going nowhere right now. "Okay. What am I thinking?"

He pauses and finally turns to face me again. "You're considering whether I'm a trap or not. Someone wants to kill you. And behind that is concern about a friend, whether he may have been compromised. Farther still... is the thought of a woman. You're lying in bed together, holding each other. She's crying. You've killed someone." He shakes his head. "But she doesn't know that."

I swallow. Where the hell did he dredge up that bit about Patty? Nobody knew about Patty.

"We can walk," he says. "Or it would be faster in your car."

The Syndicate's got their thumb in this for sure.  The welts on that body look like smallpox and I know that's what Charne-Sayre's research is about. I haven't come all this way to leave empty-handed, but I'm sure as hell not going to end up like those two bodies on the side of the road. Finally I motion toward the passenger door and we get in and go farther down the road, him telling me which way to turn whenever the road forks. Eventually we come down into a valley where black shade cloth canopies spread like huge black wings over maybe ten or twelve acres. They're growing something under it.

"What is it?"

"An herb."

"You're not growing it out here to market. What's it for?"

"The production of pollen," he says. He glances out at the fields and back at me. "But I don't believe the plants are what you'll find most intriguing here."

I say nothing. I'm losing patience, tired of playing 'guess what's in my hand, grasshopper'. I park the car at the end of a row of old wood frame houses, get out and follow him toward the covered fields. I know what the plant is. I've seen it before--ginseng. There are a couple of young boys working the rows, pulling weeds, a sight that takes me back a few years. I flash on a group of ragged kids working rows of cabbage or turnips in the mud. We never had it this nice, though, that's for sure. I don't notice anything particular until a girl in braids comes along, and then another girl. They're twins--no, another one pops up from behind a raised row of plants. Triplets. Weird.

And then the boys get up and file past us. The clothes are different but the kids inside them look identical. Something cold grabs my gut.

"What is this?" I say.

He raises his eyebrows. "A perceptive question. They're workers, nothing more. Servants of the greater purpose."

I put in my time as a kid doing that, serving the 'greater cause'. The state, the institution I grew up in, Mother Russia; whatever they want to call it, it's all the same. I find my hands balled into fists and make them loosen. "Yeah, whatever. So they're producing pollen to feed bees. Is that it?"

He shrugs. "Many will be needed."

"So what are you doing here? You don't want it to succeed, either."

"It is my duty, my function, to assist with the preparation. I--"

The party line. He stops, his mouth still open, but now I notice something, one of the girls fallen between the rows. I go through an opening between two benches to look. She's pale, blood pooling on the ground below a deep cut in her palm. A pair of garden shears lies beside her and her lips move but no sound comes out. I turn back to Smith. Do they just let them go here?

"You going to do something about this?" I say, my eyes still on the pale, barely moving lips. "Or are they expendable? She's bleeding. Looks like she cut her hand."

The news doesn't shake him. He comes to where we are and bends down beside her, covering her hand with his own. I look around at the other kids. They go on about their business, not as if they're trying to block it out but as if what just happened hasn't even registered. When I look back, he's helping the girl to sit up. Her color's better and her hand... There's nothing--no blood, no cut. She gets to her feet, picks up the shears and moves down the row to her work. If it weren't for the dark stain on the ground, I'd figure I hallucinated the whole thing. Something in my gut turns hard.

"It's getting late," Smith says, and he turns and points to where the sun's sinking toward the horizon. "Come."

So we turn and leave the ginseng fields and go back toward the row of buildings.

"You're welcome to stay the night," he says now. "It's quite a distance to the nearest town and all too easy to lose your way in the dark on these winding roads."

I grunt in reply.

The whole complex seems to be the fields, and then a row of small houses along the strip of road. There don't seem to be any other buildings, or any other activity going on.

"Dinner will be served soon," he says.

On the dirt road, two boys carry a big cooking pot between them and take it into one of the houses. A girl takes down laundry from a line in a yard and puts it in a basket. Several boys have stopped to drink from a fountain on their way in from the fields. Behind them, two girls follow, buckets in hand. They don't whisper or giggle the way girls do. All the kids are the same--one style of girl, one kind of boy. Not a sign of another adult anywhere.

"You're welcome to look around," Smith says to me now. "Perhaps you can satisfy your curiosity that way. Dinner will be served in that house over there"--he points to one with green trim--"in fifteen minutes. Do you have a watch?"

"Yeah," I say, and I start back toward where I've parked the car. It's just a white Corolla, not too old, nothing fancy--something that runs and doesn't attract much attention, which is why I took it and not the black Mustang parked next to it. The keys were in it, too; that was another factor. But I'm far enough away that nobody's likely to be looking for it around here. Seems solid enough to get me all the way to Vancouver, which is where I'm headed next. Vancouver, make a few connections and then skip the country, hide out in Hong Kong or Singapore or Bangkok; the old man doesn't have a lot of connections in the East.

I turn at the car. A couple of outbuildings, one a barn, the other a kind of combination tool shed and workshop, are visible now behind the houses. The first one has no lights on inside. I go up and look. Through the window I can see stacks of supplies: sacks of flour, potatoes, canned goods, toilet paper, boxes of laundry soap. I turn around and spot a weedy passage between two buildings. He said to look around. I follow the path and come out into tall grasses.

Hills rise close behind and a path shows in the grass, beaten down from being walked on. I follow it along the near hillside and around a corner. A slice has been cut from the hillside in front of me, a section maybe twenty feet wide that's been completely removed. The exposed edges have been fitted with cement walls, a detail that wouldn't show up from the air if anyone were looking with planes or satellites. Each wall holds a set of metal doors. I go closer, put my hand on a door and listen. A slight humming comes from inside but there's no sound of human movement or footfalls.

He told me to look.

I open the door just a fraction of an inch and the sound swells.  Suddenly I realize what it is: bees. I remember the two bodies on the roadside and shut the door fast, then I turn away, my heart suddenly doing double-time, and head back toward the row of houses. I don't know what to make of this place. They're raising bees as a delivery system. The kids are like bees, too, busy and expressionless, but hey, they were designed to do a job, like machines. They probably don't even feel anything, so what difference should it make? Except I guess the old guy expects me to put all the pieces together. If they need workers now, they'll need them later, too, to do their dirty work: raising food, building things, cleaning up. A lot of us are going to die and the 'chosen' ones who don't will live on in some kind of multiple hell, carrying buckets and watching their cloned selves do the same.

Something bites at the back of my neck. I swat at it without thinking and then realize what it probably is, what I've done. Maybe it's the fear that sets my heart racing, but next thing I know the ground is rushing up at me, smashing into my cheek, and my body feels thick, shot through with pain.  My heartbeat stands out above everything, grinding and pulling like a tractor stuck in mud. I'm going to die here. All this--all these years--for nothing, to die from a bee sting out in the middle of nowhere. I can't breathe. I struggle for air and the scene around me goes black. All I can see is the 'quiet room' back in the orphanage and the little blond kid Sergei, dead in a threadbare white crib, his eyes big and vacant, staring.

Eventually there's a blur hanging over me that resolves itself into Smith. Sweat covers my face and neck but the rest of me... feels okay. I reach without thinking for the spot on my neck but there's no pain anywhere. Even the side of my face that hit the ground doesn't feel bruised.

"Come," he says, and offers me a hand up.

I blink hard, shove his hand away and pull up to a sitting position. "You knew that'd happen--"

He frowns. "Mr. Krycek, I--"

"You didn't have to get rid of me. Just let me wander around here and I'd do it myself."

"If I'd meant to get rid of you," he says calmly, "I would have left you here. I wouldn't have--"

I look at the ground and then up at the horizon where the last of the sun is slipping down, a thin curve of neon yellow. I'm shaking and I know it's not the bee sting.

"Supper, Mr. Krycek," he says with that signature calm.  "The others are waiting."

He turns and I get up and we start back toward the houses. He's like Spock without the pointy ears. I watch my boots, one slipping past the other, steady rhythm. Sergei stares at me with those big dead eyes and inside the pocket of my jacket, my left hand is clenched tight.

"Mr. Krycek?"

I look ahead and pick up my pace. Who am I to keep a roomful of kids waiting for their dinner? Even if they are mindless clones.

* * *

We have beans for dinner, white ones with a little ham tossed in. There's bread, and vegetables, and an apple set at each place. Some of the kids eat theirs and others take them along as they go back to their houses. There are two long row tables. I sit at the end of one and Smith sits across from me. None of the kids pays any real attention to us. Or to each other, for that matter. Like they're all of them off in their separate little dream worlds, except that they probably don't have much in the way of minds to dream with. Instincts are enough to get them by, or whatever programming's been bred into them. My stomach's a little queasy. I tell myself it's from my little episode outside but the truth is, being here reminds me of the time the old man took me to Tunguska when I was eleven, the nightmare covered with its thin coat of normality. Still, the spoon keeps finding its way into my mouth.

I guess I must be eating slowly because when I think to look up, nearly half the kids are gone.  They go out two by two, a boy and a girl. Beyond the window I can see them heading off into the houses.

"This it?" I say. "This is everybody here?"

Smith's cutting carrot chunks into smaller pieces. He shrugs. "No one else is needed."

"And you play camp nurse."

"I coordinate." He pokes two or three little carrot rounds onto the tines of his fork and puts them in his mouth. When they've been chewed and swallowed he wipes his mouth with a napkin. All this time he hasn't taken his eyes off me. "This is not the only facility of its kind," he says, and then a minute later, "Are you staying with us tonight?"

I give a non-committal shrug. It's dark now and it'd be pretty easy to lose my way trying to get back to civilization. Civilization's also where someone's going to be looking for the car I'm driving. "Yeah," I say. "I guess."

He gestures toward one of the boys clearing tables and the kid sets his dishes down and comes to us. Must be some kind of mindspeak he's using, because after a glance at the kid he turns to me and tells me the boy will get me towels and show me where the showers are and where I'm supposed to sleep. He gestures for me to follow the kid so I do, out through what used to be the living room of this old house and into a back room where linens are stacked on shelves that line the walls. I'm given a towel and a wash cloth and then the kid leads me outside and two houses down to another building where the showers are--one side for girls, one for boys. We go in the entrance on the left and he points out the facilities. Three boys stand under a line of showerheads; they glance at us but not with any interest and then he touches my sleeve and heads out again. The last of the light is nearly gone and it's cold.  The contrast with the bath house is enough to make me shiver.

We pass three more buildings and go through a wooden gate and up to a house. I've seen lights going out in houses as we pass. This one's already dark. We go through a tiny living room and then into a larger room at the back. Two sets of bunk beds are set against a broad window that overlooks the ginseng fields; a girl's already gone to bed in an upper bunk. The kid gestures to the lower bunk on the other bed so I guess that's where I'm supposed to sleep. I nod okay--there doesn't seem to be any point in talking--and he turns and goes out again. I look at the bed by the glow of a night light on the wall, sit down on the mattress and then get up again and stare out into the dark. I don't want to be here. I don't want to sit and think, or lie on a bunk and think. I grab the towel and washcloth and go back outside and to the bath house. It's the beginning of October but no rains have come yet.  The grasses are dying and they fill the air with a sweet, dry smell that would make me want to lie outside looking up at the stars if it were warmer.  And if this weren't the Stepford compound and I hadn't nearly died an hour ago.

Two boys come down the path as I go to the bath house, their hair wet. Two more are inside. They basically ignore me, busy lathering up. I feel a little weird, but judging from what I've seen of the kids' curiosity levels, I'm not going to be as stand-out as I feel, so I strip and get into the water. The spray's only warm and the room's not heated all that well so I hurry up and clean off and get out again. Both kids eye me a little, but probably only because it must be weird seeing someone who doesn't look like them. Their bodies are smooth and unscarred, but I guess Smith sees that they stay that way. I still have no idea what he did to that girl, or to me, but it scares the shit out of me just thinking about it. The old man trying to send me off in a flaming car I understand. The power of blackmail and deception I understand, and the language of bullets and grenades and mines. The black oil creeping into a bony old man, or the picture in my head of Ivanova's parents being torn to shreds by an alien hatchling--I can grasp that, too. But this, a power beyond reason and imagining, gives me the shakes.

Back in my bunk I lie in the overpowering quiet, hoping for sleep that I know isn't going to come. I see the girl lying in the ginseng rows again, how pale she is, how helpless without a voice, and I think of Lena. They said she was bleeding, too, only not from the hand. I try to keep the picture out of my head. Smith doesn't say much; he just figures you'll put the pieces together. Not the only facility like this, he said, and I've got to admit it's a nightmare picture. They won't kill everybody off.  Some salvation. At its nightmare best, the future could look like this, quiet and calm on the outside, empty and pointless inside. Even these kids--this is no life they're living.

I lie there fingering the coarse cotton blanket that serves as a bedspread, staring up at the slats holding up the bunk above me. The moon's coming up; it slips a shaft of light into the room, making the far wall glow. Soon the boy comes in, the one who brought me here. He takes off his jeans and climbs into the bunk below the girl. A few minutes later I can hear his breathing, shallow and regular.  He's fallen asleep.

The room shrinks, pressing in on me. What are the odds we won't just get crushed like ants? Or that somebody will actually stumble across a formula for a vaccine that works even if I do manage to make it back inside the shelter of one of the groups? What if I pick the wrong one? All my life I've told myself I can't afford the indulgences other people have--possessions, attachments, wants--because I've got to do this, help make this plan happen so I can save myself. I'd always figured somehow I'd succeed. Maybe I had to think that way. But if it's all been in vain? What've I got to show for twenty-seven years on this rock? 

Where's the payoff?

I roll to one side and then the other. Stuffing the pillow farther under my head doesn't help. The moon creeps slowly up the wall and when I close my eyes, I see the numbers flashing on the car's dash. A jolt of adrenaline hits me, and the heat from the explosion, and then I hear waves; I'm sitting on the beach at night. When my eyes open again, the moonlight's a streak high in the corner of the room.

Something hot and strange fills me--dream residue--and I make myself get up. Outside the window, moonlight shines silver on the covering above the ginseng rows. It's strange here after D.C., the hollow quiet broken only by the sound of crickets, the occasional coyote howl and the breathing of the two kids in the next bunk. The girl rolls from her stomach onto her side, close to the edge of the bed, and her hair spills down over the side of the mattress. I go closer. She's taken out the braids; her hair is thick and wavy. My hand reaches out.  I almost touch it but I catch myself. Patty had brown hair, but not thick like this, and the color was lighter. She was sitting next to me on the beach in that dream--no, more a memory. We'd been there once.

My fifteen minutes of normal life: I remind myself I can't afford to think about them now. If we'd argued or it had ended badly I could've blocked it all out with no problem and been glad not to ever think about her again.  But it wasn't like that.

I pace the room a couple of times, then go out to the living room, stare at the road and end up back in the bedroom. I want to be out of here, on the highway headed toward Vancouver and then the Far East. Moving: it's a cheap substitute for actual accomplishment but right now it's all I've got. Out to the living room again. The road's a strip of brightness between the darkened houses. I picture myself walking down it, getting into the car, starting the engine but still I'm standing in front of that window, cold, and now I hear a noise in the back room, one of the kids. I go to look.  It's the girl, restless in her bed, grunting or moaning quietly. She rolls toward me, her noises louder. When I turn back again, Smith's standing behind us.

"She seems disturbed or something," I say, taking a step back.

Maybe it looks weird, me standing here. He reaches out to still her and I retreat to the living room and count the little panes that make up the front window.

"Sometimes they become a little restless," Smith says, coming into the room a minute later.

"What, you mean you can't program it out of them?" I turn back to watch him in the shadows.

"Your concerns are rather curious given your occupation and motivations," he says, stepping forward into a spot of light. "It's one of the things that makes your kind interesting."

"Don't patronize us. We're not insects." Maybe we are to them. "What do they want anyway, your... kind?"

"They want what you want--to be able to live, to express themselves. Not to be confined."

"So they do it at the expense of some other species?"

"Isn't that what you do? Remove those who are in the way of your convenience, your survival?"

"Shut up, old man."

Air in here's too thin. I go back to the bedroom, sit down on the bunk and put my shoes on. It's nearly four-thirty. In another hour or so it'll be light.  I can get a head start on Vancouver, maybe make it in before the night's over. I figure I've got at least a dozen hours of driving, but every hour on the road is an hour farther away from here, and that suits me fine.

When I look up, Smith's standing in the doorway, watching me.

"You don't want this to happen, either," I say. "Otherwise you never would have showed me what you've got here. What are  _you_  doing to stop it?"

"I myself am incapable of stopping it. I can only give you the pieces. What you make of them is up to you."

What else could I have expected from this guy?

I stand up, pick my jacket off the end of the bed and brush past him. On the way to the car I close my mind and concentrate on my boots hitting the dusty road, on where they're taking me, but it plays in my head again like an overlay to what's in front of me: last night, the sudden pain and the way my heart was grinding, the burning in my lungs and then watching everything go black, thinking I'd never see the light again.

"Mr. Krycek--"

I don't turn back.

"I can't wage your campaign for you. You must show yourself capable of using the information. It's the only way."

I unlock the car, get in, start it and flip on the headlights. Smith's not following me but I don't wait for the engine to warm up. I just gun it and get the hell out of there.  

A hundred miles down the road I'm still picturing the clone girl.  I can't get her out of my mind.

 

   End Part 1

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The period post-car bomb up to the confrontation with Mulder in Hong Kong (*Piper Maru)

I left Alberta even jumpier than I'd been when I went there. I'd met a guy who could do things that contradicted the laws of nature--nature on this planet, anyway--had seen a crop that would help spread future terror and watched the restless sleep of a girl with no voice and even less of a life. Did I mention that I almost died? It was brief but it made its impression. Before the sun came up the next morning I'd set off on the road to Vancouver. I was running from my own fears as much as from the old man's vengeance and what Smith had shown me the day before. But sometimes it takes a while before you notice things like that. All that registered was that I was running. Each mile I went seemed like a victory at the time.

For a while I played the radio as I drove along, but it didn't really block out the things pounding through my head. I'd seen the Oil and I'd heard the story about Maria Ivanova's parents. I'd seen evidence of the tests and the hybrid attempts while I was in charge of herding the Japanese doctors around. But there was some kind of distance to those things, some mental cushion, compared to actually sitting at a table with a couple dozen live, in-the-flesh cloned kids. Maybe it just hit too close to home; I'd been a kid at a big community table once myself. The clones, though, they were empty inside, their hollowness hidden away inside those perfect bodies: no scars, no rail-thin limbs, no haunted eyes or acting out at Smith's installation. I kept trying to tell myself they were just test tube products, machines created for a purpose, but it wasn't enough to chase the chill from my gut. Even as I drove along, my mind kept pulling up memories of the orphanage that I hadn't known were still in me. And Smith--I had no idea how he'd done what he'd done to me. Whether it was some way of rearranging matter or whether there was some kind of mind-trick involved, the big question was what else could that power be used for? How could you defend against it if they decided to use it as a weapon?

Smith was a pain in the ass, but more than anything else he'd shown the clumsiness of an amateur spy. If he believed in their cause, he wouldn't have shown me what he did. But everything he said was cryptic, like he was afraid to let too much out. I'd seen the bees, though, and I knew what they were for. Was this how they were going to get rid of whatever part of the human population they didn't want, just infect us with some variation of an antiquated disease? If that was their plan, the vaccine efforts weren't going to make much difference in the end. Or was the smallpox just a test virus? Obviously they had the ability to breed the features they wanted into a population. But the clones weren't perfect, either; I'd seen that in the girl's restlessness while she slept. And what did they want with hybrids, anyway? Were they waiting all this time just to have janitors who could survive to clean up after them? Hardly worth the hassle of invading and colonizing a planet. They must need more than that. How had Smith put it? They wanted 'to live, to express themselves. Not to be confined.'

There was something in there, some hint in what he'd said if only I could figure it out, but my mind was a mess. I'd been on the road for seven hours, five of them spent in what must've been the first major rain storm of the season, and the motion of the wipers was getting hypnotic.  I hadn't really slept much the night before and I could feel my alertness slipping. And I wasn't about to pull what Mulder had on the way to Skyland Mountain and end up drifting into oncoming traffic. So when the road brought me into the town of Cranbrook, I decided it was time for a break.

Bad break, as it turned out.

I'd just eaten and was starting to back out of my parking space when a cop with nothing better to do came up behind me and stopped me for having a brake light out. He actually parked behind me, blocking the car I was driving, so I was stuck. My gut reaction was to bolt, but I needed this car. So I tried bluffing my way through, said the car was my cousin's. I think he would've bought it but evidently somebody'd been watching when I changed the plates on the car twenty miles out of Medicine Hat and they'd called it in. I didn't know that at the time; I just knew the cop was spending way too much time on his car radio and when he got out again I could see it in his face: I'd been had. So I took off as fast as I could but my biggest concern was the tape in my jacket pocket. If they caught me, they'd confiscate it and my future would be gone. All I could do was gamble, so I tossed the tape out into some ivy beside a building as I ran past. Good thing, too, because thirty seconds later two guys came running from the opposite side of the street and brought me down with flying tackles. I took it hard on the shoulder and then there was pain and a crowd started to gather and I was snatched up and hauled off to the local jail.

Captivity does a number on me, not so much the effect of the confined space as knowing somebody else is pulling the strings; I just want to get the hell out of there and back to where I can breathe for myself. And I had it bad in Cranbrook, though I tried not to let it show. I had to remember where I'd thrown the tape and I went over and over the route in my mind, but I sat there with sweaty palms and a sick pool in my stomach anyway. I was by myself for most of the afternoon, trying to keep from losing it over the way my life had spun out of control in the last couple of weeks, fighting back flashbacks of my argument with the old man, watching Scully's sister go down, remembering the way the explosion had thrown me. Then there was the bee sting the night before. I made myself come back to the tape lying out there in the rain. Hopefully it'd fallen down between the leaves and not ended up where some kid would pick it up and pull the tape out of the cassette just to watch it flutter in the wind. Hopefully some dog wouldn't piss on it. Chemical wipe-out. The old man had this spiel: the mundane things that sometimes bring down men and nations, and this looked like a pretty good example.

Just before dinner they transferred me into a cell with three local skinheads. I got the stares and the verbal shit--they wanted to make sure I knew I was the omega in this group--but things seemed to settle down after dinner and frankly, I was dead tired. So while they played poker, tossed around their bonehead rhetoric and generally ignored me, I hunkered down in the corner and fell asleep. Came awake thinking I was back in Afghanistan, that I'd been hit by flying debris, but--lucky me--it was just a blanket party. There's something about having your head slammed against a set of bars. Repeatedly. Nearly broke my nose, but there's not much you can do when they've got your head covered and your arms pinned back. When they were finished they dumped me in the corner again. All I could think--when I could think past the explosion in my head--was that I'd be a jurisdictional issue since I'd stolen the car in Alberta and this was B.C. They'd talked about transferring me. It would be my one chance to get away. Assuming I lasted until the cavalry came.

I guess luck smiled on me a little there. In the morning a squad car showed up for me, and just one officer. He was taking me back to Alberta--Lethbridge, which was more than a four hour drive and perfect for what I had in mind. About eight miles out of town I started telling the guy I had to take a leak, I couldn't wait; I wasn't going to make it to wherever he was hauling me, or even to the next town for that matter. So after a couple of minutes he stopped on the roadside and followed me toward a stand of trees. But even though he was watching, half-anticipating I'd make some kind of move, I still got the jump on him. Tripped him, took him down and left him cuffed to a young tree, unconscious. I'd bought myself maybe six clear hours to work before anyone would miss him and start searching. By then I'd better be halfway to Vancouver.

Took his uniform and headed back into Cranbrook in the squad car. I'd watched the route we'd traveled leaving town and I found my way back to the place where I'd tossed the tape. Spent half an hour in the rain between two buildings, scanning the surface of the ivy inch by inch, then slipping out to search it whenever there were no passersby, the whole time my pulse beating in my ears and my head thundering like a stamping machine in a factory. Luckily the wet weather was keeping people off the streets. 

Eventually I did find the tape. I went back and changed into my own things, then swiped another jacket from an unlocked car and a baseball cap to hide what my forehead looked like. Behind a shopping center I managed to get myself a ride in a grocery chain big rig heading west. I would've liked to stretch out in the back but the driver didn't trust me enough to let me back into the sleeping compartment. But after what I'd been through, just a dry seat and the knowledge that nobody was going to beat me up was good enough. I was cold and soaked and I felt like death warmed over. Driver took pity on me, gave me some coffee and a couple of aspirin and I just curled down into the corner and slept the whole twelve hours it took to reach Vancouver. When we got in, it was nearly two in the morning and I was dropped off on a deserted street corner, my head feeling like it was about to break, the rest of me wrapped in what felt like the onset of the flu.

Che'd set me up to meet with someone at Simon Fraser University, a whiz kid into encryption who might be able to break into the data on the tape I was carrying. I'd need to sell some of that information just to buy myself a plane ticket off the continent. Turned out to be old home week. Or it could have been. Grigori was Russian but I realized right away that I couldn't afford to let him know my background; it'd be a giveaway to anyone the old man sent looking for me. So we met outside the campus library at seven in the morning, me looking like hell and nothing like a student. 

If he was disturbed by my appearance Grigori didn't let it show. He took me back to his apartment and sat right down with the tape, leaving me to fix myself something to eat and sack out again on the couch. By the time I was ready to return to the living it was late afternoon. I was feeling a little better and my host had scored his first hit. He'd read extensively about World War II codes and recognized the use of Navajo. Two days later he made contact with some Indian kid whose grandfather had been a code talker. I didn't like the idea of potentially spreading the tape's information around--these guys were computer geeks and they could have had connections to anyone--but there was really no choice. Somebody had to get at that information; either I wanted it opened up or I didn't. So I waited for the translations, in limbo, hanging around Grigori's apartment, which made me antsy as hell. It made me realize that when I got to wherever I was going, I was going to need a place of my own, something stable and secure for however long I'd be there. No hotel rooms, no guest beds. I needed to be by myself, let myself sink into the local landscape and disappear.

Anyway, I waited. Grigori managed to find me a cut-rate airline ticket for when the time came. But a lot of the time he was away at class and I was left to shift for myself or to face the stuff running through my head, none of which was any too pleasant. 

When the documents finally came in, I had to process the information in them. Roswell, Majestic 12, sightings by military pilots--they were all there, a record of alien contact dating back to the forties. But who had money to pay big for this stuff? Not the civilian UFO groups out to validate the experiences of their members. I'd need someone who was out to profit one way or the other--souvenir hunters or some government that thought it could capitalize on the knowledge it might discover. Or someone willing to pay me  _not_  to spread the information. My biggest risk was in spreading the word about the material being available. If the syndicate got wind of it, they or the old man would track me down no matter how many layers of security I tried to hide behind.

Ché was the one who found me my initial buyer, a rich Austrian industrialist whose wife had had an encounter one night while on a Washington state vacation. He'd seen the ship's lights himself, had found his wife speechless and shaking on an outdoor balcony overlooking the ocean. There were records in what I had--dates, times, pilots' accounts. He paid me $350,000 for my information, dropped in a Virginia park where Ché was waiting to pick it up, and I had my traveling money. I didn't waste any time in booking that flight off the continent.

I went to Singapore first, probably because I thought Hong Kong might be too obvious a place to land. Paid three months' rent on an apartment and I guess I was okay for the first couple of weeks. I had this bunker mentality; the only thing I could think was to create a safe perimeter around myself. No run-ins with the law--Singapore definitely isn't the place for that--and nothing to attract the old man's attention. All my contacts were filtered through Ché, and to prospective buyers I became Maxine, retailer of treasure maps to alien crash sites. I thought about getting a bodyguard but they attract attention and they can be bought; after all, they do what they do because it pays. Truth was, I didn't trust anybody and in the end I figured I was just as well off without one. The lower-key the better. What I did need was someone to run errands, send messages, cook, clean, translate. Maybe help me navigate the area if I needed it. Found a woman through an agency--Lilly--and she took care of the day-to-day stuff. She was middle-aged, short and stocky, all business and dependable. In fact, she was efficient enough that I didn't have to go out at all, and as it turned out, I'd come just before the onset of the winter monsoon, so by the third week it was raining nearly all the time and I was stuck inside my little paid-for palace as surely as if I were locked away in a prison.

At first I tried to ignore the trapped feeling. I buried myself in the documents I had for sale, going over them for any information I could use. A lot of it, like the Majestic-12 papers, weren't that helpful. They talked about analysis of the Roswell and Corona wreckage for the purpose of using the technology--craft materials, how they must have been flown, the strategic consequences to society and the power structure if there were a lot of sightings and people started to believe. There were instructions for handling crash materials, both vehicles parts and bodies, and here I finally found information that rang true to the kind of things I'd seen and heard: four crash workers in hazard suits had fallen ill hours after handling the Roswell bodies. All four died in the hospital of "seizures and profuse bleeding". So there it was, the truth all the military and political bureaucrats were ignoring in their rush to analyze the spoils: the attack we were facing wasn't going to be military but personal. No weapon in any military arsenal, no layout of hardware or show of firepower was going to stop what the black oil would do to individual human bodies.

It didn't help my state of mind, thinking about it. Finally I had money and I was on my own. I could buy myself anything I wanted--security, comfort, sex, vacations, another motorcycle; I'd missed that since I left Malibu. But what good was it going to do me in the end? My apartment offered no safety from the future. I was still locked out of the only possible salvation around and I had no idea how the hell I was going to get myself back on the inside. The more I tried to think about it, the more the walls closed in on me. I bought exercise equipment and worked out. I dipped into the nightlife a little but it made me nervous, being out there and always wondering whether someone might spot me. Anyway, it was easier to order girls in, and I did that a few times...until they sent me one who looked like she was about twelve and scared out of her wits. I knew how the young ones got there, sold by poor families or tricked into thinking they'd be working legitimate jobs. If I sent her back, somebody else would only do what I hadn't so I gave Lilly some money and told her to find the kid a legitimate place to stay. It pissed me off bad, the fact that they'd even sent her to me. After Lilly'd taken her away, I put a fist through the wall.

Two days later was my birthday. I wasn't in the mood for another girl and I'd taken to drinking, so I sat around feeling sorry for myself and my twenty-eight pointless years, refilling my vodka glass and remembering five years earlier when Patty'd come up with that strawberry shortcake for my birthday in spite of the fact that she'd had to hunt all over to find berries in November. In a way it was a minor thing, a lot of effort put into a detail, but what I remembered is how she'd put out to do something nobody else had ever done for me.

I nearly called her. Don't know what I would've said but I actually dialed the number. Then I got a jolt of reality and hung up fast. What good would it do to up-end her life like that? I knew how she'd been that last night, crying onto my shoulder and hoping I wouldn't notice. The last thing she needed was to have me check in from out of the blue, Mr. Come For The Weekend.  I wasn't exactly anybody's dream lover. Hopefully her life had worked out for her.

It was the last straw. The next morning I had Lilly do some research, find me a place in Hong Kong, and I went. Took Lilly with me because she was dependable and spoke the language. She was all business and that's what I was looking for, someone who could get the job done and leave at the end of the day. I told her six months max--six months and we'd re-evaluate--and that was okay with her; she had family in Singapore and didn't want to be gone too long. I had Ché put out some feelers geared toward salvage seekers. Several B-36 bombers carrying atomic payloads had gone down in the Arctic during routine patrols in 1950 and the people interested in them wouldn't necessarily be the kind the old man and his group would pay attention to. I made the sale, took in about a million and a half and decided I'd better bank it; no telling what I'd need it for later on. I tried to get a grip on myself and my life. Hong Kong has a lot of parks. I made myself take walks, get out there and face trees and grass and birds. Hell, I even took one of those island ferries to watch the pink dolphins off Lantau Island. Took Lilly along on that one. She'd never seen anything like that and she was curious. We both stood there at the deck railing thinking our own thoughts.  She was as self-contained as I was and it was a good thing. It was perfect.

The unexpected bonus to my downed bomber transaction was that I was contacted by some guy named Jerry Kallenchuk, the salvage broker who'd outfitted the B-36 group. He wanted to work a deal: he'd get me customers for a cut off the top, and of course he stood to make money outfitting the salvage operations that followed. Which was fine with me. It was a chance to get Ché off the hook. I'd been nervous about Ché's part in this from the beginning.  He was too valuable a resource to lose by getting caught working this UFO sales job. Jerry did a couple of minor transactions for me before we finally met. We were sitting at adjoining tables in a downtown restaurant, both of us waiting, when I finally realized Jerry was Geraldine. Needless to say, she was surprised to find out I was Maxine. I didn't like her much and I figure the feeling was probably mutual, but I knew that as long as I was her cash cow, I was safe.

It almost worked out that way. A few big-ticket deals came in. I took in the money and put it away except for the bonus I gave Lilly; she had a bunch of relatives she was helping to support and I wanted to keep her on my side. It was crazy, having money. Anything I'd wanted I could've paid cash for and taken home, but I wasn't used to living that kind of life and there didn't seem to be any point in starting now. Anything I wanted... except safety, and the chance of being saved down the line. Okay, so I bought a few clothes and some furniture, enough to make my place livable. Couple of pieces of art. I thought of starting my own little army, my own muscle, but I'd been on the other side long enough to know that loyalty was only a function of who paid the most. Besides, just how much of a threat would I be, up against the old man and his group?

I was beginning to see something, though, now that I'd had a few months to let things settle--now that I was hidden and could step out onto the sidewalk without sending my blood pressure through the roof. It wasn't just the way I'd head-butted the old man that'd made him try to get rid of me. I was the obvious one to sacrifice. I'd been in the Bureau; they knew who I was. I'd made the perfect patsy for the attack on Skinner. The other two would be a blur to him. I was the one he was going to remember. And since the Scully job had been botched, they would've been pressing the old man to get rid of the liability I represented.

I thought of something else, too, maybe farfetched but hopeful: what if this was another one of the old man's tests? Real, life-or-death test, granted, but a test all the same. He'd been ready to sacrifice me in Afghanistan. If I beat the car bomb, maybe he'd see me as even more valuable somewhere down the line. Not right away; it was going to take a while. But maybe--maybe--there was a way to work myself back to the inside, to move up, even, if I was patient and played my cards right. I'd have to have something to offer the group, though--maybe something they'd be desperate for. With a little planning, I just might be able to pull it off.

Enter my big brother.

I had a few days warning, at least. Ché'd been following the radar movements of the salvage ships and he'd been watching the Piper Maru just to keep us on the safe side. When it pulled out of the North Pacific unexpectedly and made a beeline for San Diego, he knew something was up. Next thing we knew, the crew was all in the hospital with radiation burns and the FBI had been called in. And I knew what that meant. It was going to be a mystery to them and that meant the case was going to end up on Mulder's desk. I'd worked a case with him and I knew how he got off on solving puzzles. With the promise of something alien attached, he'd work even harder. I just hadn't counted on how fast he'd put the pieces together.

But I did have Ché monitoring airline flights, so when Mulder's name came up on a flight to San Diego, and then to San Francisco and Hong Kong on the same day, I knew it was time to clear out. I didn't know if Kallenchuk would sell me out to save herself or not, but Mulder'd know the tip that had led to the Piper Maru's search had come from the DAT tape, which meant it had come from me. And I couldn't afford to let him go putting my name in a report where the old man could pick up on it and track me down. Not after five months of hard work at keeping myself off the radar. I was going to have to try and make some kind of a deal for Mulder's silence.

In the twelve hours I had before he got in, I made arrangements to vacate my place. I'd paid ahead but I wasn't concerned about getting the money back; I had plenty in a bank account in Zurich. Lilly took care of the move-out details. She'd stay behind to pick up the refund on the lease and I told her she could keep it. After all, she'd been a big help, she had mouths to feed... and I wanted to make sure she stayed grateful enough to keep her mouth shut about me. The only way I could see to shut Mulder up was to offer him the DAT tape, which wasn't any particular loss to me since I had all the decrypted documents anyway. It shouldn't be that big a deal. I'd offer Mulder the tape, he'd react like a little kid at Christmas and I'd take off for Madrid where hopefully Paco could help me find a place to hang out for a month or so until I could plan my next move. Funny, though, that no matter how many ways you map things out in your head, they always play out differently.

I had Lilly stake out the restaurant in front of Geraldine's office because I knew she always went through the restaurant to get to there. When Mulder caught up with her, Lilly would give me a call so I'd be ready for them back in the salvage office. The whole plan seemed straightforward enough, but in the couple of hours I had left, my mind started eating away at me. The last time I'd seen Mulder was right after I'd killed his father. He wasn't going to have forgotten that. And then I'd nearly killed his partner and he'd be pissed about that, too. Maybe he wouldn't want to deal; maybe he'd feel more righteous hauling me back to the States in handcuffs, and then where would I be? He'd have his precious tape and me on the road to 'justice'. Though having the tape would be like carrying around a time bomb. Expose that information and the syndicate would be forced to take him out.  But he'd probably never think that far. He was such a blind idealist. All those perks--Oxford and everything--while I grew up in an institution, and he still needed to be bailed out of the problems he created for himself, either by Scully or maybe the way I'd saved him when I knocked him down from the top of that tram car. What would he have gained by frying himself up there? Some badge of loyalty to his partner saying he'd tried to find her even if it killed him? He'd nearly killed both of us trying to prove that earlier on the parkway. He was a real piece of work. I would've made something of the opportunities he'd had.

Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. Lilly did her job but how were we to know the French would be right on Kallenchuk's tail? Lilly saw them enter the restaurant in time to warn me and I realized Mulder and I were going to have to talk fast, but as soon as he got inside the door he started harping on his father. First words out of his mouth. Not 'Where's the tape?', which is what he'd come for, but something he couldn't do a damn thing about. I snapped. I  _had_  to make this deal but those French agents were probably already headed toward the back hall. I tossed Geraldine outside the door just in case they'd gotten slowed down in the restaurant and Mulder and I still had a minute. No luck. I heard the shots and I had no choice but to get out of there.  So I bailed.

It was a lot like running from the car bomb, my life melting to shit before my eyes, but I had to make one last stab at getting to Mulder. So I ducked into a produce shop halfway down the block, hoping Mulder would manage to get away, and he did. Luckily he ran in the same direction I had and I was waiting to grab him as he went past. I told him I could get him the tape he was looking for and to meet me at the airport in forty-five minutes. If he followed me, the deal was off. If I even smelled a setup, I'd make it my life's work to be sure he never found that information. Then I got out of there, watching him over my shoulder as I made my way down an alley and over to the back street where Lilly was waiting with the car. Mulder looked fit to be tied but he stayed put.

I went straight to the airport and studied the departure area for any sign that Mulder'd set somebody up to intercept me, but I watched for a long time and I didn't see anything suspicious. Inside my jacket, my heart was banging away like an engine low on oil, though. He'd  _want_  to capture me; he'd feed on the satisfaction of turning in his father's killer. But he didn't have a gun; this was Hong Kong, and they weren't allowed. Besides, he had no jurisdiction here, and negotiating cooperation from the locals would be a matter of months, not minutes. Still, he could try something on his own. In which case I'd have to counter with an offer I knew he could never refuse--information about Samantha. I wasn't absolutely certain she'd been held at McClellan, but the old man's interest in dead kids in the area made it damn likely.

In the end there was no guarantee Mulder wouldn't find some way to trap me, but the alternative to not showing up at the airport was certain exposure in his case report. My hand was being forced. Hopefully the lure of the documents would be enough to buy my safety. But before I handed over that key, I'd make damn sure Mulder understood the danger he'd be facing if he tried to go public with the information. Hell, beyond saving my own skin, I might save my brother from becoming the old man's target. Which was okay. For as naive as he was, his heart was in the right place. Some day that do-right, crusader spirit of his might just come in handy.

But would he do the 'honorable' thing and let me walk away without a struggle? If the situation were reversed, he knew I wouldn't.

I'd told Mulder to meet me near the phones; I'd actually called him from the other side of the terminal to make sure he was in place. But when I went to meet him I caught sight of the backs of two men in trench coats at different banks of phones. For a split second I was looking the other way, and that's when Mulder took the opportunity to smash me in the face with the receiver. The pain in my nose threw me off long enough for him to get me up against the wall and take my gun, and for a moment there I thought he wasn't going to be satisfied this time with just dumping the contents of his little storm cloud over me; I figured he was actually going to kill me right where I stood, even if it meant never getting the tape. But he cooled down.

My nose hurt like hell. And for the moment I was trapped. Mulder sent me to the bathroom to clean up and I figured I'd have a few minutes to work on my next move. But it didn't play out that way. One thing I can say: If I ever see a woman in a men's bathroom again, my reaction won't be to laugh. A second after my face hit the wall, I knew I was on my way to living out the nightmare that had haunted me since I was a kid.

 

End Part 2


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From takeover by the black Oil (*Piper Maru) through being locked in the missile silo, to a way out... and eventual integration into the Russian vaccine program.

NARRATIVE A

Eventually I remembered it all--being thrown up against the bathroom wall, watching the Oil slither out the woman's nose and mouth, but seeing it come straight through her skin, too, making its way to mine. The first of it went straight into my neck from her hand around my throat. There was this... sensation. Invasion, that's the only way I can describe it. Knowing you're being taken over and wanting to fight it but having your reactions stopped in that second of recognition. By then it was already too late.

I remember the woman crumpling to the ground once the Oil was out of her, and I thought of Mulder. What was I going to say? I figured I should warn him somehow, but it didn't matter what I thought. I was already moving, going out that restroom door, and when Mulder asked how I felt, I guess the Oil decided to show off its twisted sense of humor because the words that fell out of my mouth were, "Like a new man."

I was a bystander inside my own body. The Oil liked it warmer than I did, so it turned my thermostat up a couple of notches, which made me feel a little sick, but not to worry--it covered for me, held back the extra flush of color, didn't let me get nauseated enough to throw up. Close but not quite. Luckily we were sitting for the twelve hours to L.A., and an hour after that it was another five to D.C. Most of that time the Oil just shut me down, had me say I hadn't been sleeping well lately, which had been true enough since the salvage ship had pulled into San Diego. For a while Mulder tried to pry information out of me, but the Oil wasn't giving anything away and after a while he noticed he was getting strange looks from the passengers around us when he grabbed me by the collar or tried to rough me up, so he quit and just watched the movie and like I said, the Oil put me to sleep for most of the trip, which was just as well. Couldn't help thinking, though, how Mulder would react if he'd known he was practically rubbing elbows with one of those alien entities he'd always been so hot to confront. Hell, I was as alien as anything he could've wanted.  If he'd only known.

Part of the time I could think clearly but other times I was overridden by what the Oil was running through my brain, as if I were just a low-priority user on a networked computer. I tried to figure what my chances were for getting away. Would the Oil let me get thrown in a jail cell and then just slither out, looking for someone else to take it to where it wanted to go? It did have an itinerary; I understood that much. The woman had come right for me and the Oil jumped to me because... I had to be going where it was headed, so hopefully that meant I'd end up somewhere out of Mulder's reach. Unless it decided to jump ship when it saw its next ride, leaving me disabled in Mulder's custody. And then? A lock-up, and the old man would pay some guard to kill me, or send in somebody posing as one. Or maybe I'd rate high enough to have him come in and do the honors himself, hand me a paper infected with an exotic virus or something. Nah. He'd want to show me I wasn't worth his time. He'd send someone else, some expendable lackey. I wanted to sweat, but the Oil wouldn't let me do that, either.

In L.A. Mulder shoved some food into me because I hadn't eaten on the plane. He said I looked a little weak and I said I sometimes get airsick on long flights, which is true enough, but I don't think he believed it. Probably he figured it was just the effect of finding myself captive. He tried to milk me for information again. He wanted to know what secrets I'd sold and the Oil said it was all Pacific salvage stuff, that Geraldine had been repping for me and that she pushed whatever would make her the most outfitting money. Which made sense; it was a good line. He asked about MJ-12 and I found myself reciting the papers chapter and verse. The only thing I could think--when I could squeeze in a thought of my own--was that the information must not be valuable, that giving it out was a smokescreen to throw Mulder off the trail to something more important. There had to be some significance there I could use--when I got a chance to put the pieces together. It was only a passing red flag at the time, one I hoped to compartmentalize for when I got my mind back, because I figured if I tried to do too much thinking for myself right now, the Oil might fight back in some way I'd regret. I might end up like that woman in the john in Hong Kong, and who knew whether she was dead or alive?

Talking was a trip in itself. I'd take in Mulder's questions, or some flight attendant's asking what I wanted to drink, and there'd be this slight delay while the Oil processed the question and decided on a response. I just sat there waiting to hear it, whatever it'd be.

When we got to D.C. Mulder rented a car and had me drive. He was close to home and his patience was nearly gone. He wanted that tape so bad he could taste it and he wanted the key to the locker I'd kept it in. I'd been worried about the locker key for the past hour, thinking the Oil wasn't going to want to hand it over and when it didn't, guess who was going to get pounded for holding back? But my hand went up with the key in it and Mulder had his little treasure. I wondered what the Oil was thinking but whatever it was, at least it saved me from getting beat on again.

I started for the skating rink where the locker was, but after a few miles the Oil had other ideas and we turned onto a darkened county road. About three minutes later Mulder spotted a car tailing us. Took a few seconds for the Oil to decide to take Mulder's suggestion and speed up, but it didn't get us anywhere; the tail car rammed us and we went off the road into a ditch. Mulder was out--hit his head on the dashboard--and I guess I lost a second or two but I could feel the Oil on alert inside me. Then a guy was beside the door, telling me to get out of the car--one of the old man's lackeys. He took me toward his car, demanded the tape and gave me a rifle butt in the gut when I told him I didn't have it. But the pain was cut short; it was literally forced out of me and I could feel the Oil gearing up again. Then there was this flush of heat and a light bright enough to blind me, and I was standing there looking down at this guy crumpled on the ground, his skin bubbling with radiation burns. A minute later the guy's partner showed up, tried the same routine with me. Got the same treatment.

Almost before I could shut my mouth I was in their car, turning it around, headed for the ice rink. It was after midnight and the place was closed, but I went around to the back and put a finger up against the door lock. There was another one of those flashes and the door opened when I tried it. Same routine with the locker. I took the tape out, shoved it in my jacket pocket and got myself out of there. Twenty minutes later I was standing behind the old man's chair. If he was surprised to see that it was me, he covered pretty well. But he'd been expecting the Oil. He had what it wanted, and whatever that was, it looked like I was going to find out soon enough. Cardenal popped in for a minute thinking he'd save the old man from me. I was really hoping he'd push it so I'd get to see him lying on the floor looking like those two guys who'd run me and Mulder off the road; stupid fuck deserved that. But he backed off when the old man barked at him. Guess you can't have everything.

When I left the old man's, I found myself on the road back to the airport. When I got there I bought a ticket routing me through Minneapolis to Fargo, North Dakota. I was sick of flying by then but I knew I wasn't going to get any say in the itinerary. So I got into my window seat, leaned into the corner and tried to sleep my way through the next few hours. When we landed in Fargo it was a rental car, some fast food, a pit stop and I was on the road again. Can't tell you what it feels like to have something foreign inside you stuffing food in your face, or wiping your mouth, or hauling you into the john because it's decided you'd better take a leak before you hit the road.

Then there was the old man. At first I figured I'd be getting away clean; the name I'd blurted out when I bought the plane ticket was Larsen, a good Norse name suited to the area, one designed to keep me from being traced. But then it hit me. The Oil had gone to the old man looking for directions; he'd know exactly where I was headed. Hell, he was probably on his way to intercept me once the Oil was finished with me. My heart wanted to pound, but no luck. I'd been overridden again.

The road I was on led into raw, snowy territory and when we got to the silos the pieces started to fall into place. I went down flight after flight of stairs, blasted out a couple of guards who happened across me and ended up in an underground hangar that held one of their ships. The Oil tightened inside me at the sight of it and sent me straight for the craft. I scrambled up on top. Sat there perfectly still for probably a good half-hour. I didn't know what the hell was going on and there was nothing I could do until the Oil decided to move me.

Finally it did. I made my way to a spot over the center of the ship and looked down. Right away I felt sick as a dog--like I wanted to die. Thought it must be some kind of radiation from the ship, but it turned out to be more nightmare than that. I slipped down onto my knees and it started--the Oil coming out of me any way it could and my consciousness coming back, and of the two--my mind and body--my mind was the worse off because at that point I had no memory at all of the last day and a half. Last thing I remembered was going into a Hong Kong airport bathroom with my nose feeling like it'd been run over and all of a sudden I was in this windowless cement cavern wretching black goo out of every opening in my face.

The Oil burned coming out--burned bad--and I got weaker and sicker as I watched it pool and disappear into the spiral on top of the ship. My body was shaking, wanting to collapse but the Oil wouldn't let me, not until all of it was out, and then I just crumpled, slipped down the side of the ship and dropped onto the cement. I don't know what happened after that, or how long I was out. When I came to, I noticed a square of light and I managed to make my way to a door, but it was locked. There was a hallway beyond it--empty, but the lights were on, which meant somebody had to be there. I yelled and pounded for all I was worth. If Mulder had any way, I knew he would've followed me.  He wasn't going to give up on that tape, and even getting beat up by him again would be a cheap price to pay for being rescued.

I yelled until I was hoarse, pounded until I didn't have enough strength to stay standing. Finally I collapsed onto the floor below the door and just watched that square of light. I could taste the Oil and feel the trails it'd burned coming out of me. I wasn't having any trouble shaking now. Fact was, I couldn't stop.

No matter how I tried, I couldn't remember a thing that had happened after that Hong Kong bathroom. I had no idea where I was, except that the place I was in was big and dark and cold as hell. The only thing I had to hang onto was the fact that Mulder'd be royally pissed if I'd gotten away from him and he'd be trailing me even if he had to drag himself on his hands and knees to do it. I forced myself to keep looking at that patch of light in the window, as if somehow it would keep me alive. My brain was sluggish, half-frozen, but there was something in there, unfocused, that wouldn't go away. Gradually it got a little clearer and a little clearer until it stabbed me like a knife in the gut: a Morley. I could swear there was a faint whiff of Morley in the air. I think my heart missed a beat or two then, and the patch of light above my head went black.

I remember shivering... and shivering... but I was too far gone to think much about the fact that the old man had locked me in here to die. Spent a lot of time drifting in and out of consciousness. When I was awake my stomach ached something fierce; I was starving but I had no idea how long I'd been there. And it looked like things were only going to get worse.

Then at some point there were flashlights and voices in the dark--two voices. One of them kept saying ' _Mr._  Krycek' and I knew I should recognize it, but it didn't make any sense at the time. Then the lights were on and everything was just too damn bright. I had to keep my eyes closed and I was shaking again; I couldn't stop. But I couldn't get up, either. I didn't have the strength. After that I remember being moved, jostled. I was carried and then driven somewhere but I couldn't see anything. They must've put me out because I don't remember thinking about the Oil or anything else.

When I finally came around I was in a bedroom in a house--nice place, the kind that looks like someone enjoys spending time there. The first person to come in was a short-haired woman, a doctor. The second was the Brit, wearing a suit and tie the way he always did. He was the one who'd decided I was worth pulling out of that hole in the ground.

\-----------------------

SCENE: NEW ALLIANCES

_Freed from the missile silo, Krycek regains consciousness and meets his benefactor._

 

First thing I'm aware of is sunlight on one side of me, but I can only feel it; I can't see it. I can't see a thing and my mind's in neutral, doing a lazy strobe that turns into a forward crawl as I will myself to focus.

When I try to move my head--that's when I notice the pain. My eyes are doing a slow smolder, like an old campfire. Same with my nostrils. There's no moisture at all in my mouth. I try running my tongue over my lips but it's thick, swollen and stiff and like everything else, it hurts. Finally I try moving an arm. It shakes like an old man's, but I manage to get a finger to my lips. I wince at the row of scabs I find.

It's not cold here; that's something at least. The last thing I remember... It had something to do with cold. I remember being way too cold, and...

"You're awake."  

Footsteps that have paused in the doorway come closer. My heart jerks, then stumbles ahead and I grab for something. My hand lands on the edge of a pillow and squeezes hard.

"How are you feeling?"  It's a calm voice--woman's voice. Nobody I recognize. My guess from the fact that I'm lying here feeling the way I do is that she's either a doctor or one of the old man's minions. I'm hoping it's not the second of the two.

"Bet--" Can't get it out. I've felt better but I guess that's a given. "Water--"

It comes out as a croak. Luckily she gets the message because a few seconds later something's being spread across my lips to moisten them and then I feel the end of a straw.

"Take it slowly," she says, and I try but I still manage to choke. My throat burns afterward, but I reach for the water twice more before she takes it away.

"Where am I?"

She eases me back against the pillows when I try to sit up. "You're safe."

"From who?"

For a moment there's silence. My heart rate spikes. Wherever I am, I'm in no shape to make a getaway.

"Only three of us know about you. Apparently there are people who would rather do away with you, but they won't find you now." A pause. "Your body may carry some very valuable information."

So there it is, the reason I'm here and not... wherever I was. I'm merchandise. 

I loosen a little in spite of myself.

She's walking around to the other side of the bed now, and while I'm wondering who's got me this time, and how, and where, I hear drapes or curtains being drawn. Then she's back beside me again.

"I'm going to check your eyes now." She leans in close and peels away what feels like tape. "I've drawn the curtains. Let me know if the light is still too much for you." A pause. "Your condition has improved quite markedly in the last couple of days, but you're probably going to find your appearance a little disturbing. You might want to wait a while before you try looking in the mirror."

I flash on an old guy I knew in Moscow--ex-spy who'd been doused with battery acid, a guy with a face like twisted clay--and find my fingers tangled in a wad of sheets.  The gauze comes away and is replaced by her hand.

"Alright, Mr. Krycek. Try opening your eyes. Slowly."

I do it. Slowly. The light--what little there is of it--makes my eyes and head throb, but the feeling passes for the most part after about fifteen seconds. I'm in a bedroom, not a hospital room. The bed is a four-poster with a thick pine frame. A picture hangs on the far wall, a little girl reading--Manet or something. I glance at the wall switches, the outlets, the door knobs. I don't remember clicking my heels, but it's pretty obvious I'm not in Hong Kong anymore.

"Well?"

I look up at her. She's got short blondish hair bordering on gray and looks to be about fifty. I shrug. "Not too bad."  I can feel my eyes watering, though, and she leans closer and wicks the wetness away with the corner of a tissue.

"It's a good sign, Mr. Krycek--the tears. It shows the ducts are functioning properly. From what we can tell, the substance damaged only the soft tissue surrounding your eyes, leaving the nerves and retina int--"

"Substance?"

She moves my hand where I've grabbed her arm and sets it back down on the bed calmly.

"How long have I been here?"

"Mr. Krycek, you've been through what appears to have been a very... traumatic physical situation. I don't have all the answers about your condition--certainly not about the substance itself. We're looking into it, to learn what we can. But you need to relax. Let us help you."

People don't have a habit of going out of their way for me. Obviously nobody's clued her in.

"Look up," she says, taking my chin in her hand. "At the ceiling. Then you won't find the light so invasive."

She's got one of those little flashlights. I look up the way she tells me to and she shines the light in my eyes, first one and then the other. The light switches off. I look at her.

"As I said, your progress looks very positive. And we'll have lab results soon--perhaps tomorrow--that will tell us more about how your body's been affected, and--" She leans in suddenly. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm..." Truth is, her light's made me remember flashlight beams cutting through a very dark place. Dark, cold place.  Somewhere I've been recently.

She's still eyeing me.

"I'm okay." Or maybe not. It was cold and dark and...

She shakes her head. "I'd have to classify that as an overstatement. But you must have questions." She heads for the door but turns back. "I'll send Mr. Davies in to talk to you. Unless there's something you need right now."

I shrug. Haven't gotten that far yet--figuring out what I need.

She disappears into the hallway and I close my eyes, straining to remember where I've been and what I've been doing. I see flashlights again, cutting through the dark. When the Brit arrives, he finds me cowering in the corner like a wounded animal. I've remembered the Oil pouring out of my face.

 

 

" _Mr._  Krycek--" He bends down over me and suddenly I recognize the voice I'd heard when they found me.

I only half look at him. I'm shaking like a leaf and he has to go retrieve the doctor. It takes both of them to get me back to the bed and even though they're on either side of me, holding on, the Oil comes between us, streaming and dripping as if it were actually on my skin again. I tell myself it's only in my head, nothing but a mental picture, but it makes me want to run--anything to get away from it--and I'm panting so hard I start to get lightheaded. I can't tell what they're saying to me; my head's full of static, and then a bag's shoved in my face, the doctor's saying breathe, breathe and I want to gag--want to take off--but I make myself sit there and breathe into the bag.

After a while I notice a hand on my shoulder, rubbing it, and I realize the Brit's backed off. Gradually it all fades--the pictures of the Oil, the sensation, as if it's liquefying my organs and taking them out with it--and for a moment everything goes completely silent. I shiver and then start to shake. The doctor makes me lie down, pulls the covers up over me and adds an extra blanket. She puts the IV back in my arm. I didn't even know it was there until I ripped it out scrambling to get away from the private little horror show in my head. A needle goes into the IV line and pretty soon I feel myself starting to go cloudy.

When I come around again, the Brit and the doctor are standing in the doorway, talking quietly. The shadows in the room have moved, so I guess I've been out for a while. She comes in and puts a hand against my forehead but she doesn't go for the thermometer on the bedside table. She offers me a drink like before. The water's clear and sweet and while it slides down my throat the memory comes back to me--the scene I made earlier and what I must've looked like. It's going to take more energy than I have to invest, though, to be embarrassed. I work to clear my head.

The Brit waits for the doctor to leave before he says anything. When she's gone he pulls up a chair. For all I know he's here to take me back to the old man, though I'm not about to let him see me panic. He's seen enough already.

"Do they know about me?" I ask.

He doesn't look at me quite squarely, as if he's uncomfortable at having been a witness to my little freak show earlier.

"No." He shakes his head. "Nor will they be hearing about you from me; you can rest easy on that account. The fact is that  _my_  life would be in danger if they knew I'd saved you." There's a sincerity in his voice he hasn't bothered to hide. I think he's telling the truth.

"Where was I? How did you find me?" And why--that's the biggest question. "How long have I--" I check for my watch. Naturally, it's gone.

"It's the 22nd, Mr. Krycek. March 22. You've been with us five days. I daresay at first we weren't entirely sure you were going to pull through, the effect of the cold--"

I reach for the glass on the bedside table and manage to bring it to my mouth, sip a little water and get the glass back to where it goes without spilling it. My head's starting to clear.

"Where was I? Where are we now?"

"What do you remember?" He leans forward and I file the sequence away for future reference. He may have saved me but he's in this for the information.

I close my eyes. "Hong Kong. Last thing I remember... Mulder'd found me and we were at the airport. He hit me in the face with the phone, gave me a bloody nose. Then he sent me into the john to wash up and--" I shake my head. "Then I was in some big place in the dark, cold as hell and I thought I was having a nightmare--" I stop abruptly, take a deep breath and wait for the icy fingers gripping my gut to let up. Anyway, I'm not about to tell him that the Oil's been lurking in the back of my dreams since I was eleven. He knows nothing about my history. I force myself to think back to the airport. "The thirteenth. That's the day Mulder and I were in Hong Kong."

"And this... place you were. In the dark. There was an alien ship in it?"

I reach for my memory of the dark place--carefully--but as soon as I see the ship I can feel the Oil again, on the verge of pouring out of me. I curl away onto my side and almost retch. Panic floods me but I grab for a focus, the latch on the window, and I study every surface and angle as if the force of my stare could burn layers off it. Finally the panic eases. I can hear myself panting, low and steady, like a settling dog. When I finally turn back, the Brit looks beyond me, out the window, and clears his throat.

"My apologies, Mr. Krycek. I had no intention of--" He nods toward the hallway. "She'll reprimand me, no doubt, for disturbing you." He stands. "Perhaps you should rest again. I'll have Dr. Phillips come check you once more."

He sets the chair back against the wall and turns to leave.

"There  _was_  a ship," I say, giving him what he'd asked for. Maybe it'll encourage him to keep me alive.

 

 

The next time I wake up it's nearly sunset. The curtains are pulled back and I must have an east-facing window because I can see pink-tinged snow on mountain peaks in the distance and above them, darkening sky. The doctor's sitting in the Brit's chair, watching me. I wonder where he picked her up; she doesn't seem to have the right edge for the kind of games we play. I'm groggy at first. We talk for a couple of minutes; apparently she's a researcher straining at the confines of academia, looking for something more--significance, something where she can tell she's making a difference. Maybe the excitement of something new. Well, she's in for a lot more than she bargained for here, but I'm not about to pop her bubble by telling her so.

After a few minutes she lets me sit up. We talk about the painting on the wall. She tells me about spending a summer in France, about visiting Giverny. When she sees I can handle myself if I take it slowly, she lets me go into the bathroom, though she waits outside the door after pulling it nearly closed. I do okay until I pull the handle and flush. Actually, the mistake is glancing at the swirl of water circling as it goes down. Almost instantly the swirl becomes the curl of Oil entering the top of the alien ship. I gag on my scream and find myself in the corner, biting down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from making another sound. A second later she's there behind me, wondering what set me off, trying to coax me back to bed. I tell myself I won't do this,  _will not_ let a picture in my head control me this way, and I actually push the vision of the Oil back toward its dark corner. But I'm a mess. I stand there shaking like an idiot. Shit.

Shit.

She gets me back to bed, helps me get my breathing under control and finally I'm able to calm down. She wants to know what set me off and I wish more than anything she'd just go away. But the reality is that alone I'm likely to be staring this Oil scenario in the face again--soon, from what I've seen already--my head buried in some corner the way it was a minute ago. I can't take the freefall feeling, so finally I tell her about the Oil streaming and the Oil crawling like worms, and I wait for her reaction. She's shocked but she's intrigued, too. She doesn't treat me like I'm nuts. Mulder'd like this woman. Maybe it's a good thing they don't know each other.

When Dr. Phillips suggests dinner, she promises to make sure they won't serve me anything that'll look remotely like the Oil I've described. I end up with a small plate but the food's good, all of it. My appetite's pretty decent in spite of everything and I guess that's a good sign. Nothing I eat reminds me of the Oil. Afterward she leads me down the hall to a living room and gets me settled in a recliner. We pass a mirror along the way but she makes sure to stay between it and me. There must've been a mirror in the bathroom, too, but I was too busy freaking out to notice. Anyway, one thing at a time.

She brings me an afghan, spreads it over me and takes her cue to leave. A minute later the Brit appears. This time he's got a ski sweater on. It breaks this picture I have of him in my head, where he even sleeps in a suit.

"I hear you're doing better," he says, taking a leather chair across from me and putting his feet up on an ottoman.

I nod but say nothing and then look away, out a window to where I can see the lights of other houses scattered on the same slope we're on. I'm still trying to shake the alternate reality feeling and the fear of being hit by another flashback. I'm in no shape to do much negotiating, but then nobody's giving me a choice.

When he doesn't say anything more, I look back. "So what's the deal? What value do I have to you?"

He clears his throat. "I felt the need to step out and take a gamble," he says. "Calculated gamble, Mr. Krycek. It's become very apparent that this is the time for such action." He glances down at his shoes, soft leather loafers that must have cost four or five hundred. The socks are cable-knit, nice.

"And I fit into your plans how?"

"That's what we need to discuss." He opens his mouth, pauses for a second, then leans forward and starts again. "How much do you know about the man who employed you, Mr. Krycek?"

I take a deep breath. "He recruited me in Russia eight years ago. I was... I'd been doing small stuff--embassy intelligence, stuff like that. I was looking for a chance to move up."

"And a chance to come to America, perhaps?" His eyebrows rise, as if he thinks he might have discovered something about me I don't already know.

"Yeah, sure." I shrug. "No matter what the propagandists tell you, everybody knows this is the place to be. Speaking of which--" I gesture toward the window.

"Colorado," he says after a beat. "This is a resort home I keep. Under another name, of course."

"Where'd you find me?"

"North Dakota. That was a missile silo you were in. Have you remembered anything more about it?"

I swallow and remind myself to breathe. "Not anything I want to. How'd I get there?"

"Apparently the Oil made its way from a submerged craft into a diver on a salvage ship. The diver went home to San Francisco, the Oil transferred itself to his wife--"

"Long hair? Brown?"

"Yes." There's almost a 'zz' on the end of it. He smiles. "She was found on the floor of an airport bathroom in Hong Kong. Apparently that's how the Oil made its way to you."

"Is she alive? What about the diver?"

"The diver has mysteriously disappeared... courtesy of your former employer, no doubt. The woman was taken to a Hong Kong hospital as a Jane Doe. When her identity became known, Mulder returned to question her but she remembers nothing, only her husband coming home unexpectedly."

"And other than her memory?"

"She's fared better than you, I'm afraid. Apparently your location near the ship, or the state of the Oil at finding its craft--" He shrugs. "Perhaps it got excited, hasty in its rush to reclaim the ship. The injuries you've suffered are very similar to what we've seen in those exposed to the green fluid."

He stops abruptly.

So hopefully I'm miles ahead of that guy with the battery acid makeover. I want to reach up, touch my face--reassure myself--but I make sure my hands stay where they are.

"I believe it's time to talk business, Mr. Krycek," he says. "To lay our cards on the table."

 

 

"You first," I say. "This is your game."

He gets up, pours himself a drink, offers me something the doctor's left for me, homemade eggnog without the rum. I've gone two long hours now without freaking out and every added minute is another victory.

"I don't take this step lightly," he says, settling himself again, taking a sip from his glass and setting it on a coaster. I bet he never gets a drop on the furniture. "The Project has been a well-guarded secret these many years, known only to the few. The participants were a close-knit group for reasons of security. As you can imagine, it would hardly serve us to allow knowledge of the work to spread to outsiders."

He reaches for his glass. I take a sip of my drink and wait to see where he's headed with this.

"Quite frankly," he says, setting his glass down again, "I've found your... former employer's modus operandi quite disturbing of late. Frighteningly casual. Far too many chances have been taken. Too many risks. The Scully affair, of which you were a part--"

He glances at me but there's no blame in his expression.

"You should never have been a part of that assignment, since you could be readily identified."  He pauses and his eyebrows rise. "The matter of the salvaged craft. He moved it without our permission; we were informed only afterward."  He stops for another sip of his scotch.  "Assistant Director Walter Skinner of the FBI was shot by one of Spender's men; I don't know whether you were aware. It was a foolish move." He shakes his head and frowns. "And he offers only excuses for his actions, not compelling reasons. I'm afraid if he's allowed to continue on this... independent path of his, the Project will be undone. We'll be discovered and all our work will have been for naught. Certainly Mr. Mulder has been bearing down on us of late--"

"And you never know if Mulder'll spill the beans," I say. "Or if you could actually make him realize what's at stake. Not that he'd go along with us."

"Yes." He nods, thoughtful. "His father was like that, or came to be... a short-sightedness that could doom us all, though sincere."

"Not that you're looking at a lot of people saved in any event." I look him in the eye.

"No." He leans forward in his chair. "I realize I'm taking a chance here, Mr. Krycek. And I won't flatter you by saying that I chose you for reasons I didn't. It's safer to collaborate with someone who already knows about the Project. It lessens the risk of exposure. And I'm assuming you have no abiding love for our associate in Washington, so you aren't likely to be motivated to report my... pro-active investigation... to the group, or to him."

"No love lost here." I wouldn't pass the old man information if he were lying dead in front of me. If I did, he'd probably resurrect himself and use it against me.

"I've remained a member of this group," he says, leaning back slightly in his chair, "because I believe we have no choice. The coming invasion is fact. But I don't subscribe to the others' hope of an easy salvation. I don't see that we have any guarantee, or any cards to play, to keep the aliens from doing to us what they'll do to all the rest."

"Once we've given them what they want"--I shake my head--"it'd be insane to trust their word."

"Precisely." He smiles a little--not from the prospect of being double-crossed by the invading hordes but because he's talking to someone who sees it the way he does. Obviously it's been a while.

"Vaccine's the way to go," I say, leading a little. "Assuming you've got one that works."

His eyes widen but his mouth goes small and tight.

"He was wrong to tell you about the vaccine," he says, his eyes narrowing. "That information was to remain within the inner circle."

"He didn't. I figured it out for myself... when I wasn't shoveling shit and cleaning stalls for Charne-Sayre's horses."

His jaw drops. "You were there?"

"Don't worry. I wasn't spying for the old man, just keeping my eyes open. I'd just come to this country. He wanted me to get used to things here--you know, so I wouldn't blurt out something in Russian, say or do the wrong thing. Spent six months playing farm hand. It was five years ago."

His mouth pulls to one corner and then the other. He can't decide whether he likes my initiative or is worried that I might know he sleeps with the group's star researcher. Maybe he's just derailed by finding out that the old man set me up on the farm behind his back.

I reach for my eggnog, drink a little and ease my head back against the chair.

"The vaccine was Bill Mulder's idea," he says now, staring toward nothing in particular. "He may have been naively idealistic in one sense, but regarding our need for a defense he was far smarter than the others." He sighs and looks back at me. "He wanted to save the world if it were possible. Though we have yet to come up with a formula that will save even ourselves."

I manage to nod sober agreement, but inside I'm open-mouthed. No vaccine progress here, apparently. And Mulder's dad. What would it do to Mulder to know his father was more than just the pathetic old boozer he grew up with? I wonder if the old man's jealous that he didn't come up with the vaccine idea himself.

"It's possible, of course"--the Brit clears his throat--"that you yourself may prove to be a source of valuable data. Your current condition, any effects the Oil might have had on you, could provide us with vital information to advance the research."

There it is. I swallow and feel my fingers tighten against the chair arms.

"You didn't need my permission to turn me into a lab rat."

"No. I could have simply taken you and held you against your will." A pause. "Saving you wasn't without risk, either, as you may be aware. He may very well return to look for you."

For my corpse. My stomach does a little dive.

"And not finding your... remains..."  There's a momentary pause  "It's also probable that the aliens could have taken you.  More plausible than your having escaped."

"More likely than someone letting me out?"  But even as I say it, it makes no sense; who'd go back for me?  Mulder wouldn't.  And which of the old men would cross him by... "You don't think he's going to suspect you?"

"The only one who knew where he sent you was Mr. Cardenal, who is dead now."

"What?" I sit up a little straighter. "What did he have to do with this?"

"He was there when Spender gave the Oil you were carrying directions to the hidden ship."

I don't ask the Brit how he found out about Cardenal, or how it seems he was conveniently dead afterward. 

"In any event, I've placed surveillance at the silo site.  It's possible he may never return to see what's become of you, but if he does, we'll know to be prepared.

Something sticks in the back of my throat. "Good plan," I manage.

"Caution is critical. This is a long-term journey, Mr. Krycek. It always has been. I daresay you'll be useful more than just this once. And what can I do as one man alone outside the group? No single man can save us. I need a collaborator."

Inside, I smile. In spite of the way I feel, in spite the flashbacks sitting on my shoulder just waiting for me to drop my guard, I have to fight my mouth to hold it back.

\------------------------

NARRATIVE B

I'd hit the jackpot, though I didn't realize it at first. I'd come to in a strange place, barely strong enough to get out of bed, and with no idea of who I was with, friend or foe... okay, opportunist or foe. There was this nagging feeling of having been way too cold, of having lost time--maybe a lot of time--and just as my head was beginning to clear, the first of the flashbacks slammed into me. I could feel the oil slithering under my skin and all I wanted was to crawl straight up the wall to some kind of safety that didn't exist. I could barely breathe.

Seeing the Brit walk in in the middle of my little terrorfest didn't help, either. My first coherent thought, when I finally had one, was that he'd come to take me to the old man so he could work me over some more, the way a cat hooks its claws into a half-dead mouse and bats it around until all the life's finally beaten out of it. Eventually the doctor got me settled and gave me some kind of sedative. When I came around again, the Brit was there and it was awkward. I actually think it embarrassed him, you know--to have been there earlier, to have watched me go through that. Which made two of us. But the fact was, I was wrong about the Brit's agenda. He'd developed some serious doubts about the group's ability to keep their work a secret. Specifically, he was worried about the old man's sloppiness; evidently he'd made a couple of critical errors recently and had just shrugged them off. So the Brit had decided it was time to step outside the circle and reinforce the group's original goals from the shadows.

But it wasn't something he could do alone, and that was where I came in. I was available, I had no love for the old man, and I was a research bonus, too--a specimen who might be able to advance their knowledge of how the Oil affected human physiology. Triple payoff for the risk he'd taken in fishing me out of that hole in the ground, but there was a big bonus in it for me, too. The thing I'd wanted more than anything else was a way back into the group and it was lying right in front of me now. The Brit needed somebody and I was there. I fit the bill and I was more than willing.

Because he knew he'd need my cooperation in the long run, I had some leverage from the start, and that first night we negotiated some ground rules. He wanted to find out what the Oil had done to my body, and I agreed to tests. But no unnecessary tests and no extended hospital stays. I had free rein in my spare time. He wouldn't put a tail on me; anybody followed me around and I'd be out of there. And I got access to my test results. Cooperating bought me a chance to recover in safety and in return he'd get medical information now and my potential help later.

I wasn't under any illusions of having him wrapped around my finger, though. I knew if I screwed him over he could easily let the old man know where I was and the old man would forgive him in his sick joy at having me back. Best case scenario would be the Brit feeling like I was in this as deep as he was, so I offered him a little item of information I'd never told anybody in this country. Except that when I tried to get the words out, they wouldn't come. He sat there in his leather chair, waiting while I tripped over my tongue, only able to get as far as, "He's my..."

Finally I managed to spit out something about the old man and I sharing the same genes. The Brit didn't say a thing but his eyes got big enough. When he finally spoke, he started in on how he'd known about the old man's daughter, of course; they all had, because her mother was one of the early researchers, killed in some lab accident. Didn't take the Brit long to realize this was all news to me and I think he actually enjoyed seeing my reaction. It was a good thing in the end. While I was gritting my teeth, trying not to show anything, he sat there smirking but it made me realize, like Mulder's phone in the face, that this guy wasn't out to play my fairy godfather. It was business--it was war--and we were all on our own in the end, scrambling for whatever we could get. Alliances were for however long they were useful.

He left the next day, needing to get back to New York before he aroused the suspicions of the group, but before he went he told me Diana had worked with Mulder for a while and that she'd spent the last three years in the European operation, keeping tabs on abductees. It was like the old man--to have somebody else he hadn't bothered to mention to me, somebody he could whip out when he needed her like a pistol from an ankle holster. My guess was she hadn't grown up in any institution. Sometime, when I was through here, I'd have to check the woman out.

I spent the better part of the next two weeks under the watchful eye of Dr. Carrie Phillips, trying to regain my stability and undergoing a series of medical tests. Phillips was a hard-to-catalog blend of researcher and single mom, and in a way she treated me a lot like she treated her son. But not like a kid. She treated you like you she was really interested in you--like you were actually worth spending time on. She'd walk through every procedure with me in advance because she wanted me to understand what they were going to do to me and why. And because she knew exactly how edgy I was. The flashbacks had made me a walking time bomb and I never knew how much time was left on the clock.

Carrie didn't hover, though; I was grateful for that. I needed my space. I'd lost ten days of my life and I felt a little like I was behind a glass partition looking out on a parallel universe. I wasn't ready to step out on the playing field yet--wasn't even sure there was solid ground out there--so I sat on the sidelines and watched: the hospital people, the scenery outside, Carrie with her ten-year-old, Tyler. She was like a mother wolf with that kid, intent on giving him the tools he'd need to deal with life. They made quite a team, the two of them. But it was almost too much, seeing what Tyler had. I'd known too many kids who'd lived the flip side.

My days were divided between tests, rest and enough light exercise to ease me back into normalcy, a pretty acceptable routine except for the flashbacks that hit when I least expected them. Right from the start, Carrie urged me to face them head-on. She wanted to know what I saw, but she never pushed. If I couldn't talk about it, she'd back off, but I knew she was right; I couldn't leave Colorado hauling that kind of baggage around with me. So I did what she asked. I told her, and we talked it out, figured out strategies for getting past the images and the panic. She never smothered me with sappy female sympathy. Instead, she wanted me to be prepared, the way she wanted Tyler to be ready for what the world might throw at him.

In the end, the Oil left me like a smart house burglar, taking all traces of itself away except for some antibodies that Carrie was running tests on and the messed-up tissue around my eyes and nose and mouth, which were healing pretty well after a couple of weeks. By then I only looked like I'd been in a bar fight. I'd regained my strength, we'd wrapped up the tests, and with a baseball cap and a pair of shades I could travel without attracting much notice. So I bought myself a plane ticket, flew out of Denver and after a few intermediate stops to make sure I wasn't being traced, I headed for Ché's. I needed to put some distance between myself and the Oil experience. Maybe between myself and Carrie Phillips, too. With Ché I was safe. Ché and I had an understanding.  He knew when to back me up and when to leave me alone. Anyway, we had business to discuss.

Luckily for me, Ché had been in touch with Lilly. She'd gone back to Singapore and so far nobody'd found her or come around asking questions about the guy she used to work for. My money was still safe, stashed away in a series of cozy Zurich bank accounts. I had Ché start to trace this woman I was supposedly related to. He managed to come up with her early Bureau days and her time with Mulder. Made me almost feel sorry for poor old Mulder. He's always so damn sincere and the old man's daughter had wrapped herself around him like a python, all in the service of daddy's plan; the X-files and whatever else the two of them had going was a setup from the get-go. If Mulder didn't know yet... well, if he ever found out, it was going to knock him for a loop.

From what the Brit had said, the group hadn't gotten anywhere on a workable vaccine. Made me wonder what the old man's angle was. He'd known about the Tunguska project all along, but obviously he wasn't sharing with the group. Maybe he figured if the Russians found the magic formula, he could bring it to them at the last minute--sweep in and save the day. For a price. He'd make sure there'd be some big payoff in it for him. But I needed to be the one with the magic bullet. When the syndicate got desperate, I had to be able to give them what nobody else could. It would be the ultimate bargaining chip. But it meant working around the old man if he still had eyes and ears in the program. It could turn out to be a suicide mission. In the end, though, the vaccine was the key to everything. I'd done my time playing host to the Oil and I damn well wasn't about to do it again. And Tolya, my contact in Moscow,said they'd been making headway with the research, so I was going to have to check it out, find some new contact who hadn't known me from my time in Kraznoyarsk... and who wasn't in the old man's pocket. With any luck they'd already have a formula that worked.

Then again, maybe not. It never pays to be too optimistic if optimism means burying your head in the sand. Maria Ivanova might still have ties to the project. She might know the status of the work, but I'd lost track of her after she left Krasnoyarsk. Ché did some checking on her. The closest he came was finding her under her parents' name--Vanek--on the American University registers with a degree in medicine. But there was no specialization, no residency or records beyond the degree itself. It could have been somebody else, or incomplete records. Or she could be here; the notation could be a fake put there for her own convenience. But when he did more checking, Ché heard that she'd been seen around St. Petersburg. I'd check it out, but only if I needed to. Ché'd nailed it when he started calling her Madame Piranha. I'd look for another way into the project if there was one.

I spent a week at Ché's but I was getting antsy to have a spot of my own again, a little breathing room, and as always, the clock was ticking. I needed to set myself up in Russia and start greasing the right palms, connecting with people who could get me somewhere. Ché wasn't sure I was ready to hit the road. He'd caught me in the middle of a couple of flashbacks but I told him I was okay; if I needed the help, I'd be staying. And he knew I wasn't just feeding him a line. We've never lied to each other.

I met the Brit in New York on my way to Europe. I wanted to know how they got Oil for their vaccine trials and he said the supply was spotty, that occasionally somebody would dig some up and they had people at FEMA who'd rush in, take care of any evidence and retrieve what Oil they could for the work. I said I might be able to find him a steady source; that was one of the things I was going to be working on. He wanted to know more--it showed in his eyes--but he had the smarts to keep his mouth shut because he knew I wasn't about to give anything away. If he wanted what I had, he was going to have to wait for me to come to him. Before I left he handed me an envelope I didn't open until I was airborne. Diana's address was inside. It clinched my decision to spend a few days in Paris before I went on to Moscow.

Amazing how much the little things tell you about a person. I spent the first day watching her apartment, though I didn't have any excuse that would get me past the concierge and up to where she lived. Luckily for me, though, she had a little balcony window on a side street across from a small pension and I managed to get a room with a window right across from hers. It was an old neighborhood, nothing fancy but it provided good cover; she wasn't hanging out in an upscale diplomatic neighborhood and that was smart. There were red geraniums planted on her balcony. She'd open the door in the morning and water them in her bathrobe and then leave the window open until she left, which let me and my binoculars pick up a little of the interior--small place, older furniture. She was dark-haired like the old man and went around with this seared-in grim expression that only changed for the guy she woke up with one morning and a little old lady in the open-air market she was trying to wrangle a bargain out of. She'd turn the charm on or off, and when it was on she looked about as sincere as the old man. On the third day I dressed down a little, brushed up my best from-the-heartland Russian English and ran into her--literally--on the street. She wasn't happy, not even when I put on my sincerest apology. I asked her for directions to the St. Lazare train station but she pushed past me in a hurry and said she didn't have time. She was pissed, actually. Kind of on par with my initial introduction to Mulder, but then what was I expecting? And you've got to figure: if I'd bumped into by my ragged alter ego that morning, I probably would've been pissed, too. Wonder what she would've thought if she'd known we had more in common than just that space on the sidewalk.

When I got to Moscow I looked up my old friend Tolya. He was a snoop, a half-on-the-inside, half-on-the-outside kind of guy. The usual bureaucratic undercover work was his day job, but on the side he dealt in more exotic information--mind-control projects, human cloning efforts, UFO-related stuff. He knew about Tunguska when I'd first come from there, which surprised me at the time. Tunguska was supposed to be top-secret, but not because they were trying to fight the future. Hell, they didn't know a thing about the coming invasion. They were just trying to combat the Oil that came out of Tunguska rock before it became a real threat. That and, once they were protected, find a way to develop it as a weapon. You've got to laugh, you know, knowing the Oil wants the planet and then watching these guys prepare to lob the stuff at other humans as a territorial weapon. Sometimes as a species we're not too bright.

Anyway, I set myself up in Moscow--in a decent hotel since I had the money, though I wasn't flashy about it--and grew a beard and spent a little time getting used to the place again. America had changed me more than I'd figured it would but I had to buckle down now and do what needed to be done. I found out that Maria Ivanova's ex-husband Nikolai was off the project and there was a new guy heading it now--a Colonel Lev Dmitriyevich Semenov. My first thought was to ask Petrovich about him, but I was pretty sure I'd be better off if Petrovich didn't know I was in town. There were people who knew Petrovich who knew the old man, too. For the price of some black market American goodies, Tolya put me in touch with a scientist who'd spent some time on the project.

My biggest fear was that this informant, Chernov, might be in the old man's pocket, but Tolya checked him out first and said he was safe. What I learned at our first meeting came as a relief. He remembered the American who used to come periodically and talk to whoever happened to be in charge, but his visits had stopped about two years after my stint at Kraznoyarsk. Not a gradual falling off of visits, Chernov said, but abrupt; the old man just hadn't come back and Chernov remembered some speculation at the time about why. It made me wonder what the old man was up to, but at least it meant I was reasonably free to set my plan in motion.

It wasn't the only bit of information in my favor. While there'd been progress toward a workable vaccine, funding was low. Really low; they were practically prostituting themselves for money and Semenov was hot to have the project succeed, not only for his own career but because he was like a bulldozer. Given an objective, he was going to see it succeed one way or the other. Word had it he was a brutal son of a bitch. But maybe brutal was what was called for here. Stand around picking your nose until the Oil came and all your precious research would be for nothing.

If anybody'd known how much money I had sitting in the bank at that point, they would have been telling me to make my life a little more comfortable--buy a Ferrari or a nice apartment, or shoes as expensive as the Brit's. Make it easy on myself. But capitalist habits make you conspicuous, and standing out was the last thing I needed. Anyway, I'm more inclined to save for a rainy day, partly, I guess, because I know how often it tends to rain. And here, finally, was the payoff for guarding my money well. The vaccine project needed funding, and I needed that vaccine. For once I was in a position to make my dreams a reality. I gave myself a timetable--six weeks to make contact, through intermediaries--to let the word filter through that I represented somebody who was willing to finance the research. Another couple of weeks for formalities and contact, then a month or so for them to hire more people if they were needed while I worked my way into Semenov's confidence. I'd have the inside track on any progress and I could probably wrangle some of the Oil-filled rock to ship off to the Brit as well. He could slip it to Charne-Sayer on the quiet and her research could go forward a little more quickly. Wouldn't hurt anything to have two teams working on a vaccine.

So I set my trap lines, so to speak, and hunkered down to wait. The worst of it wasn't wondering whether Semenov would take the bait or not, though.  It was knowing that when I got to Tunguska, I was going to have to face the Oil again. I wasn't sure whether I could pull that off without freaking, not even after all of Carrie Phillips' help. Imagining the Oil was one thing; watching the real thing--even through a double-paned window from an adjoining room--was going to be a whole different scene. It made me think of Carrie, though. I hoped she'd taken me seriously when I'd told her she should break away from the Brit the first opportunity she got. She wasn't naive, but she wasn't ready for the stakes that went along with playing the Project's games. And the last thing that kid of hers needed was to lose his mother.

Lev Dmitriyevich was a figure straight out of the Third Reich, bald and fit and taut, with wire-rimmed glasses. 'Ruthless' was probably the best word to describe him. Like any experienced military man, he knew how to delegate and control. He also knew not to leave an operation to run itself, so there was only one time I met him anywhere beside the camp, and that was on an overdue few days off he was spending at a dacha on the Black Sea. It was his treat, equal parts indulgence and asceticism--evenings of food, drink and available women followed by days spent on the water, fishing and talking about the research or military strategy. I never let him know that I was actually the financier of his little project instead of the middle-man I'd purported to be, and he never let loose and confided in me completely, but he told me enough. We were strictly business partners and that's the way I wanted to keep it. I couldn't help thinking how Maria Ivanova would have wanted this man in charge of the operation when she was working here.  For the work's sake, anyway. She would've been a powerhouse for him. On a personal level she would've hated him, though. I saw what the girls looked like when they came out of his room.

I spent six months swinging between contact with Lev Dmitriyevich at the camp, occasional meetings with the Brit in London, arranging shipments of the rock to the U.S. and keeping an eye on what Mulder was up to. People might laugh at Mulder but he was a bellwether and it would've been foolish to ignore him. The old man's government cronies were working on some kind of mass mind control project but it didn't interest me beyond the fact that Scully had gotten sucked into it during an investigation and nearly shot Mulder. Would've been bad from a strategic point of view--who would we listen for if Mulder wasn't there to play canary in the mine for us? But beyond that, the incident had probably shaken the guy to the core. He depended on her like he depended on his right arm, even though they were yin and yang. It'd be overwhelming, you know--to be able to trust somebody that far in the first place. But then to have her suddenly point a gun at you, so you'd wonder if you'd ever be able to trust her again... That must have shaken up his world.

Lev Dmitriyevich kept the vaccine program on track and my funding bought the addition of a new researcher. Andrei was what you'd describe as focused hovering at the borders of obsession, an outside-the-box thinker who wasn't about to let go of a dilemma until he'd solved it. Lev liked him and kept him supplied with test subjects, though we'd already lost so many prisoners that they were starting to go out and round up locals to use. I found myself in charge of helping grease the wheels of prisoner transfers from other camps to Tunguska. It would've given me the chills if I'd let myself think about it, knowing exactly what those men were facing--a lot better than Lev and his doctors every would, though they watched the procedures and I never did. If this project worked out, thousands of sorry sons of bitches just like the ones lying under those wire nets would have a chance to survive something nobody at all was going to survive if the invasion started before we came up with a vaccine. I just blocked out the ugly details and did my job.

Finally we started to see results. Andrei spearheaded the development of a variant formula and not only did the new subjects develop immunity, they actually started to survive instead of succumbing to the side effects we'd seen so much of before. I'd wait to be vaccinated until Lev and Andrei were confident enough in the formula to do the same, but I started to lay out my strategy for presenting the vaccine to the Syndicate. The American research still hadn't produced anything viable according to the Brit. Which was perfect for me, in a way. If I showed up on their doorstep with the magic formula, I had a damn good chance of being welcomed back into the fold. Well, taken in, anyway. Once I had a foot in the door I could work on being liked.

The more I ran it over in my mind, the more my plan looked like a sure thing, and that in itself started to worry me. Shit happens, and who should know that better than I do? I started to look at the negative possibilities more closely. I could get caught taking the vaccine out of the camp, or something could happen to it compositionally before I got it to the group. Show up with a non-functional vaccine and every one of those old geezers would want to kill me personally. I could deliver the vaccine intact and the Brit could come up with something against me, to drum me out once they had what they wanted. But he still didn't trust the old man's influence on the group; he'd need me again. There were a thousand different ways it might play out and I couldn't anticipate all of them, but there was always the feeling in the back of my head that I needed to hedge my bets. Why should I trust any of the old men? If it weren't for Bill Mulder's vaccine idea, they would've been perfectly content to negotiate their own salvation and let the rest of the planet go to hell. And who could I count on to stick with the agenda and not turn?

The only one I could think of was Mulder. For as near-sighted as he was, for as easily read and naive, he was committed. He'd follow through with what his dad had in mind. But he'd need to be protected from the Oil. His sincerity wouldn't mean a damn thing if he was vulnerable.

About that time I got a message from the Brit. There'd been a leak--a potentially bad one. An alien clone who was supposedly helping lay the groundwork for invasion had decided he didn't like the company agenda. He'd shown himself in a public incident, healing somebody of a gunshot wound, and Mulder'd picked up the trail from there. The old men had scrambled to have the renegade taken out of the way, but in the process they discovered a mole of the old man's had been reporting to Mulder, and Mulder's mother had a stroke after a confrontation with the old man. Mulder'd taken off looking for the clone, hoping to get help for his mom.

Now what could be more typically Mulder? The fate of the world is at stake but what's he doing?  Chasing down help for his mother. My mother. I'd never wasted any energy thinking about her since I was a kid asking the standard question--you know, what it was about me that made me so expendable compared to the two she'd kept. So she'd had a stroke after some argument with the old man. How often did they see each other? Did the two of them just get together to argue for old times' sake? I wasn't about to get sidetracked thinking about her and anyway, Mulder had her covered. It was all he thought about: the family he was trying to patch back together. Not that it was any ideal group to begin with. When the time came, if I needed his cooperation, I'd probably have to dangle Samantha in front of him as bait.

In the end a bounty hunter dispatched the clone and the damage was controlled. Or so they assumed. They were catching their breath back in New York but it made me think about the guy I'd run across in Alberta. He wasn't satisfied with the status quo. Was he the one who'd gone public? Was he a clone? And if there were more of him, was it only the one who was disaffected or was the whole group ready to leak information to humans ready to hear their story?

It was more than a passing curiosity. The guy'd spoken in riddles, almost, but I was pretty sure there was something big behind his word games. I booked myself a flight to Alberta, wondering what I'd find and what he'd offer me this time, what he'd do if I started asking the questions I'd been too messed up to think of the first time I was there.

It was a different trip this time, I had to admit: no ride across the border in a boxcar, no stolen sedan, no need to constantly look over my shoulder. But when I got there, I found the compound deserted. The houses were still standing but the crops were gone and the bee operation had vanished, the work of a couple of skip loaders that had filled in the gap in the hillside. On the return flight I tried to recall Smith's words. What had he said they wanted? To live, to express themselves--something like that. Not to be confined. Confined to what? Whatever worlds they were inhabiting now? It was a weird comment, a strange thing to have picked to say. Confined.

The unexpectedness of what I discovered in Alberta only reinforced the fact that I needed to cover myself in as many different ways as I could. What if we had a clone rebellion and the aliens found out and got pissed enough to invade now? If the planet were under attack, Mulder would have to drop his personal search and fight back. He wouldn't just lie down and sacrifice himself, faced with the Oil or the screamers. 

But he wasn't immune to the enemy we'd be facing. Doing something about that would have to be my next priority.

 

End Part 2

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Krycek's involvement with the Russians, and laying plans to lure Mulder to Tunguska

_  
_NARRATIVE

_Ever think about the future? Nah, I don't mean the kids in college and retirement plans. Future with a capital 'F'._

_Okay, so you don't have to; you're going to be surprised. Me, I don't have that luxury._

_There aren't a lot of times when I don't think about it. But like with successful drinking, balance is the key. You aim for just enough to produce the effect you want while avoiding the side effects you don't. Looking at the future, you want to keep it just enough in mind to tighten, not loosen you. Enough to remind you why you're fighting, to make yourself want to keep going. Not enough to step into one of the thousand different scenarios for how it might actually play out, because if you think about it, none of them are likely to be too pretty._

_If you let the scenarios spin out too far, you start to wonder why you don't just put a gun to your head now. Or you back away by telling yourself tthat the way you live, you aren't likely to survive long enough to see this planned Armageddon anyway. Small comfort either way. In the meantime that day's getting closer and closer, and the only choices are to give up or keep going--fight or die. Simple._

_But only staying alive in a clinical sense isn't much of a prize in the long run. Just struggling to keep your head above water... I've spent my whole life doing that and it doesn't come close to justifying the time I've put in on this rock._

* * *

 

It was August when Andrei came up with his formula and four months later the prisoner tests were looking good--well, as good as they could, given the fact that we didn't have unlimited time to spend on the details. I could wait to make sure that every last one of the vaccine's little side-effect problems had been taken care of completely, but if the Oil came early, we'd all be dead. Or I could act now, take a chance and made sure I had some immunity... and that a few strategic people were protected, too. Mulder might hate me now, but down the line when things got tough, I was betting he might look at the situation differently.  You tend to do that when you're back's against a wall.  And once he realized who the real enemy was, Mulder would be a good fighter.  He'd put every ounce of his stubbornness into resisting the alien hordes.

Come January, Andrei was willing to submit himself to his own vaccine.  The most recent test subjects were showing really minimal side effects. If Andrei'd been a self-important son of a bitch I might've chalked his willingness up to ego and held back longer myself, but he'd never seemed like that kind of guy, and anyway, I didn't have the luxury of time to play the skeptic. Andrei, Lev and I were all vaccinated on the same day. My arm burned--burned bad--for days, but I knew it was a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Mostly I kept my mind off the pain by working out the final details in my plan to bring Mulder here. There was no way he was going to believe anything I told him, about the Oil or anything else; I figured my credibility with him was somewhere below zero. No, I'd have to throw him what looked like an inadvertent lead and he'd have to 'discover' this place for himself.

I needed a seamless plan, a setup Mulder would walk into without a second thought, and a conversation I'd had with Tolya in Moscow about the Oklahoma City bombing kept sticking in my mind. If Mulder thought he had a chance of stopping something like that, he'd jump in with both feet. Crazy little militia groups were a dime a dozen, and they were always strapped for cash. If I could work my way into one, impress them with a donation, then leak a trail to Mulder, he'd come running. I'd gain some credibility by having handed over the zealots, but that wouldn't be nearly enough for Mulder. He'd want to pump me for whatever I could tell him about the syndicate, and that's when I'd toss him a scrap about my shipments of Tunguska rock. Not a lot of details, but enough to get him slobbering like a bloodhound. He'd take over from there, 'discover' the connection to Tunguska, take off to investigate, get captured--naturally--and Lev would have a convenient new test subject right on his doorstep. And I'd come out with one vaccinated/Oil-protected ally-to-be.  It was a convoluted route to my goal, but there were two things I had to make sure of: that Mulder'd think he'd discovered the place on his own, and that Lev wouldn't realize what I was up to. He knew me only as a middle man representing someone who wanted to help combat a local threat to Mother Russia, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Tolya had warned me that militias were suspicious and not easy to break into so I started Che early, scouting the Net, getting a feel for the players and then gradually working his way into message groups as me... or some incarnation of me. Generally these guys only opened up to people they knew, but there'd always be some who were less cautious than the rest, guided more by their egos than their ideals. Or ones whose ideology was full of holes, just an excuse to go around building up a cache of guns or blowing things up. Eventually, Ché found me a taker. By the time I returned to the States about a week after I'd been vaccinated against the Oil, Ché'd been keeping up a steady correspondence with the guy for nearly five months.

He hadn't been happy with the assignment, either. The way he'd glance at the computer screen I was reading, I could tell he'd been pissed at having to play somebody this guy would take to. Not that he ever came out and said so; he'd just give me that expression of his, shrug, and go back to the sink full of dishes that had piled up because I'd come for one of my periodic stays and he couldn't resist plying me with the kind of food his mother used to make, in spite of everything. 

Not many things in my life make me feel lucky.  Having this guy in my corner, though... sometimes I just shake my head.  It's amazing to know there's someone you can count on in the clutch.

My militia target said his name was Petersen, a detail he'd finally offered a couple of weeks earlier as a show of trust, and Ché'd fed him a good story to bring him to that point. He'd presented me as a casual fellow traveler until an incident about eight months earlier where I'd gotten caught in the crossfire of a police bust in a convenience store. A robbery'd been called in and by the time the cops arrived, the guy'd disappeared and they caught me with my hand in my jacket and shot me by mistake. Ché threw in some details about spinal damage that he probably pulled off the Net and said I'd been laid up since then, in physical therapy and slowly recovering, and that the police would admit no wrongdoing. That was the straw that'd sent me over the edge, that made me want to become a militant: They were screwing over everyday citizens and getting off scott-free. It was a flagrant violation of the Constitution.

I spent the next week poring through Che's e-mail correspondence, memorizing details about my target and about the person I was supposed to be. I started writing to Petersen myself, but I had Ché check over my mails to make sure they were consistent with the persona he'd created. I told Petersen the doctor'd finally given me a clean bill of health and I was looking forward to finally meeting him and getting down to business. Inside, I was thinking that he'd damn well better bite because otherwise I was up Shit Creek, and the clock was ticking. But he took the bait. He had a plan he'd never been able to get off the ground financially, and I told him that by a fluke I'd bought accident insurance just a couple of weeks before the shooting and there was a little money left over that I could pitch in.

Ché was concerned about me going undercover with these guys but I said hey, can it be any worse than being left in a missile silo to rot? That was just before Peterson mailed me the location where we were supposed to meet. He was in North Dakota. For the first few seconds I could feel myself on the brink of a major flashback, but I fought it down. It was a luxury I couldn't afford to indulge.

Before I left town I wanted to check up on Mulder; after all, he was the reason I was going to all this trouble. I'd casually asked the Brit the last time I'd seen him whether Mulder'd been nipping at their heels and he said no. Evidently he hadn't tripped over any new pieces to the puzzle. Charne-Sayre had her little rest home trials running smoothly and from all indications, she seemed to be making some progress. Not that it would last for long. I had plans for her.

I tapped Mulder's phone, then staked out his apartment and did a little long-distance listening; pretty amazing the technology you can buy if you've got the money. But I didn't learn a whole lot. A couple of times Scully dropped by with information about a case they were working on. Mulder'd call her late enough to wake her up with some flash of inspiration about how certain pieces of evidence fit together. Everyday stuff. Made me wonder what'd actually kept him going through all the paperwork and the protocol and the mutant and psycho cases, because for all his efforts he'd never found the things he he wanted most. He hadn't found his sister and every time he managed to catch up with the syndicate or what it was doing, the old man made sure the evidence disappeared. But maybe that was it: what kept him going was the fact that he hadn't found what he wanted yet, and how different did that make him from me? My track record wasn't any too good, either, but here I was, still going and not nearly ready to lie down and give it all up.

I wasn't about to retrace my last D.C.-to-Minneapolis-to-Fargo route, so this time I took the train. It gave me time to think--maybe a little too much time. I could blow my cover and if I did, these guys would sooner kill me than let me go and risk having me tell anyone about them. Was it worth it, putting myself on the line just to get Mulder immunized on the chance he'd help me later? I mean, look at the last time we'd crossed paths, French agents bearing down on us and all he could think to do was rant on about his dad, and what scum I was. It wasn't personal, Mulder; it was a strategic necessity. There are bigger things at stake here, and the way the guy treated you was pathetic, anyway. "You're a smart boy, Fox." What does that tell you?

As if I was any better off. At least Mulder's father hadn't tried to blow him up with a car bomb or lock him in a missile silo in the middle of winter. At least Bill Mulder'd had the idea for a vaccine. Sometime I'd have to tell Mulder that. He'd like knowing that about his old man.

During the layover in Chicago I had my hair cut short, something that should appeal to the kind of men I'd be meeting, and after we pulled out again, starting north, I shaved off the beard I'd had since Moscow. I'd wanted to make it hard for anyone to finger me in D.C., but by the time Mulder captured this crew I wanted to make damn sure I was recognizable. I wasn't about to take a bullet for nothing, though I'd probably be in for the equivalent of another phone in the face, or worse. It just depended on how fast I could get Mulder sidetracked, offer him the carrot that would make him drop his stick.

I did my shaving in the train car's downstairs bathroom, then gathered up all the clippings and flushed them. It pays to be careful, especially when it's traceable DNA you're throwing around. On the way back to my seat, I passed a blond kid standing by the car door, looking out the window. Stopped me cold for a second, because at first glance he looked like Carrie Phillips' kid. When he turned around it wasn't Tyler, but the association had been made in my mind, and back in my seat again, I started to think about Dr. Phillips. Hopefully she'd taken my advice and gotten out. After all, who should know better than I did how dangerous the group's work really was, me who was sitting here thinking about getting rid of another woman doctor/researcher? 

Charne-Sayer could have been someone like Carrie Phillips.  She was a pleasant enough woman, but she also didn't seem to have any qualms about experimenting on a bunch of unsuspecting old people. And it wasn't like there were underlings to cushion her from the reality of it; she was doing the front-line work herself. Which had nothing to do with anything. She was a liability to the plan, pure and simple. The group wanted a viable vaccine and while Charne-Sayre's work was inching forward, it hadn't produced a vaccine. I had what they wanted. But I wasn't about to just hand over the vial and bow out. I wanted in for my efforts and the only way to guarantee I'd really be welcome would be for me to be the group's only possible salvation. Charne-Sayre had to go, but I wasn't about to take her out myself and risk destroying my tie to the Brit.

It was the middle of February and the landscape we were rolling past was gray and bleak. The train had pulled out of Chicago early in the afternoon and by a little after five there was nothing to look at but my own reflection in the darkness of the window. The blond boy came through my car again with a smaller, brown-haired kid in tow and it made me wonder what Mulder and I would've been like if we'd grown up together. Would he have looked for me if I'd been the one to disappear? Would he have wanted to pound the shit out of me the way he did now, or would it just have been for show? Maybe underneath he actually would've cared. Different lives--a whole different world--all of it hanging on the action of a woman with a pathetic track record when it came to men.

What would she think if she knew what had become of me, a guy with no attachments in the world sitting in a train car planning the death of another woman? Charne-Sayre didn't have any kids that I knew of. Not that it made any difference. What if Carrie Phillips had known what kind of guy she was treating when the Brit called her in? Would she have turned and run? She sure as hell wouldn't have let me anywhere near her son.

I dozed off for a while, had a dream where I saw Lena again, alive, and then ended up strangling her. When I jolted awake from the shock, it was too late for dinner but it didn't matter much; I had no appetite. Eventually a low, nagging pain settled in my stomach, but it wasn't the first one I'd ever had. It would pass.

The only person in the Fargo station at 4 a.m. was a woman, and as it turned out Petersen had sent her, which was my first alert that things could've been better planned. I'd never send someone else to make an important initial contact, especially not someone I just kept for sex and errands. She didn't know anything about me, though, just that Ed had asked her to pick me up. When we got to Petersen's place he got up and sent her away and the two of us talked. But I was dead tired--train seats don't make for good sleeping--so after a half hour or so of making sure we each thought the other was on the level, he showed me to a back bedroom and I sacked out. Woke up after a few hours, though, about six-thirty--probably just the effect of being someplace I wasn't sure of. Petersen was already up, making coffee and getting ready to go to work at a local truck dealer's. He said Cindy was on her way over to baby-sit me, no offense, and that he'd told her I was a cousin from Ohio here to visit until we made a made a trip to New York together the following month. So I guessed that was our schedule. I didn't say anything, just let him talk, and when Cindy came and Ed left, I went back to bed. I was still bushed and anyway, the last thing I needed was to be watched or followed around. Or talked at.

When I woke up again it was nearly noon, not that you could've told by looking outside. Storm clouds were hanging low overhead and it was snowing. Cindy was in the living room watching soap operas beside a basket of half-folded laundry. I took a shower, which netted me the information that she must stay here at least part-time, given the stuff I found in the bathroom drawers. The house itself was an old wood-frame place Cindy said Ed had inherited from his mother. She would've talked my ear off if I'd let her, but I said I had stuff to do and retreated to my room to set up an internet connection on the laptop I'd brought. The computer wasn't cheap--they never were--and it was a given that I'd have to get rid of it a few weeks down the road, but the money wasn't important. I had it and I needed this plan to play out.

About half an hour later Cindy knocked on my door to tell me there was lunch if I wanted it. Luckily she didn't pin me down to sitting at the table with her. When I went out, she'd taken her food and gone back to the living room, which left me in the kitchen by myself with the canned soup and biscuits she'd heated. I was hungry after missing dinner the night before and it was better fare than I'd had a lot of times, but for some reason I could only contrast what was in front of me with the sight of Ché wearing that crazy apron of his, flour on his nose and halfway up his arms while he made noodles from scratch at his kitchen table.

About 2:30 Cindy said she was going out for milk and laundry soap and did I want anything? I told her no. Actually, she was already giving me what I needed most, which was time alone. I spent the next hour, until Ed got home, going through everything in that house--closets, drawers, under beds, getting a clearer picture of Ed and how he operated. The only weapon in the house was an old .22 rifle that was too small to be part of any militia's arsenal. They had a camp somewhere out on the prairies, he'd said; it must be where they kept their cache.

The next four weeks were some of the longest of my life. Weekdays I was stuck at Ed's, sometimes with Cindy, who drove me crazy whether she was trying to or not. Afternoons Ed would come home and send Cindy off--at least, once he'd had enough of her--and then we'd talk strategy and politics, and he'd invite one or another of his friends over. The third afternoon the weather cleared and he drove me out of town to a place where you could see their camp in the distance, or at least the line of trees that marked the general area. Weekends we'd go out to the camp in the river bed and practice shooting and self-defense. I had to act like I only had a moderate amount of experience, and they took it easy on me because of my 'accident'. Later, thinking about it, I wondered if Ché hadn't designed his story to protect me as well as to feed Ed something he'd swallow. It was obvious that when the time came I'd be driving a vehicle or providing some kind of backup--nothing that would put me directly in the line of fire.

The fifth day Ed told me his name was actually Mayhew, not Petersen. He'd meant it as a show of faith, but if he was smart he would have realized he'd left me in his house for days and I already knew everything down to his credit card balances and shoe size. But he trusted me now; I'd spouted enough of what he wanted to hear about the government creeping into our lives, keeping track of people and brainwashing us. Hell, I even fed him a line about American troops being exposed to a strange 'black cancer' in the Gulf War, that the Iraqis had used it and the U.S. government had known about it all along. He swallowed everything I said. That's what happens when your desire to believe is stronger than your need to know the truth.

Mayhew's big plan was to incite the federal government into the takeover he was sure was coming by blowing up a block of New York City--some busy neighborhood, the biggest bang he could find for his buck. There was no strategic target; the damage would be completely collateral, designed for shock value and to goad the government into what he figured it had planned anyway: the suspension of civil liberties. To up the stakes, one of his men with a public works background would do a little tinkering with some gas mains in another part of town.

I kept nodding while he talked, but inside I echoed Ché's frustration at having to deal with this scumbag. I was going to enjoy watching this guy and his so-called freedom fighters go down. And Mulder was going to enjoy taking this guy. Maybe he'd like it enough to cut me a little slack this time.

When they started buying supplies, Ed would put the receipts inside an old Bible of his mother's in a bottom dresser drawer and I'd go in there after he left for work, regular as clockwork, take any new receipts to the local drug store, copy them and send the copies to Che to forward to Mulder. I hoped Mulder was around, that he hadn't decided to take a vacation or anything so I'd end up having to take these guys out myself, because the last thing I needed was another murder charge against me. But what was the likelihood that Mulder would leave the office for a vacation? He was addicted to the job. Still, the thought made me antsy and I wanted to make sure my bases were covered, so I had Ché watch Mulder's apartment. Nothing to worry about, as it turned out. He was there, probably waiting for my next envelope of receipts.

The trip to New York took three days and the closer we got, the more Mayhew's batch of goons started to wear on me with their bullshit about how true Americans would immediately see the uprightness of their cause and flock to them. I said an old stomach problem of mine was acting up, so they left me alone for the most part. I just sat there thinking about my timing, how all the pieces would have to fall like dominoes. I had a shipment of Tunguska rock due into the country the same night we'd stash the bomb materials in the storage yard. With any luck I'd be able to put Mulder and Scully right on the trail of my messenger and avoid having Mulder focus on me as his personal voodoo doll.

As it turned out, the timely arrival of the rock courier was my only piece of luck that night. As soon as the shooting started and I'd taken out the driver, things went downhill fast, starting with the rifle butt in the gut Mulder gave me as soon as I was out of the truck. It didn't matter that I'd handed these scumsuckers over, saving a whole lot of innocent lives. Somehow everything Mulder hated me for must have come together in his mind that night, because not only did he rough me up and give me a little lecture about his moral superiority, he took me to Skinner's place and let the A.D. go at me, too, after which I was chained to the balcony and left outside overnight like a disobedient dog. It was March--not even close to warm--and the cuff was cutting into my wrist, and my gut hurt like hell from the double pounding. Mulder hardly deserved what I was doing for him, the way he treated me. But I was stuck now; I'd just have to see it through. He was bound to calm down, wasn't he? The first day I'd met him he'd treated me like shit, too, but after that it had gotten better. Why would it get worse now?

But it did. My courier had obviously shadowed his pursuers, because he showed up in Skinner's apartment the next morning. He didn't know me; I'd purposely hired him through an intermediary. All he knew was that I was somebody who could identify him, but if he got away and described me to the group, I'd be exposed. Only one of us was going to leave that apartment alive. Looking back, I couldn't tell you how I managed to hang onto the outside of that balcony railing until he got there, or how I had the strength after spending the night outside to pull him over the edge. I guess I had to; it was that simple. I don't even recall the details, just the strain of yanking on him and the adrenaline rush that came with my own fear. Next thing I knew I was halfway over the railing, the metal bar pressing into my sore gut, and I fell onto the safety of the balcony. All I could think was that it was a hell of a lot better than losing my grip on the other side and having my arm pulled off.

When Mulder showed up, he was as full of himself as ever. He managed to get me past building security and then it was straight into his car and onto I-95. When I asked where we were going he punched me and told me I was going nowhere. He'd chained me to the armrest, so I just hunkered down in the corner and fell asleep. I was beat and shaking and it was warm in the car. That, at least, felt good after my night outside.

When I woke up, we were in Jersey and it was after sunset. We were stuck in evening rush hour traffic and Mulder'd pulled off for gas. I managed to talk him into getting me a sandwich and coffee--I hadn't eaten since the day before--but with the clearer head I started to worry about the consequences of my dead courier. With a body in hand, the old man would be working to identify who he'd been and who he was working for. And where he'd come from--that was the critical thing. Even though the couriers always followed indirect routes, any flight coming in from southern Russia and containing what that pouch contained was going to ring a big bell for the old man. He was going to know where that rock had come from and the first thing to cross his mind would be me and the time I'd spent in Krasnoyarsk. Luckily, my alter-identity with Lev was well-established, legitimized over time, but if the old man did manage to verify that it was me behind the rock shipments, my alliance with the Brit would be exposed. If they killed the Brit, my road back into the group would be gone along with him.

Mulder made several stops once we got into New York, but none of them must have yielded the information he was looking for because after each stop he'd come back to the car in a lousy mood. I quit asking what he was up to; what was the point when my questions only gave him an excuse to hit me? His last stop, after midnight, obviously got him what he wanted, though, because he punched me out of sheer relief, I think, and after that we went straight to the airport. I knew I'd have to remember that building and locate his contact there when I got back. It could be worth a lot to know who Mulder's source was.

Things were looking up in spite of the way my body felt and all the hours I'd spent chained to Mulder's steering wheel. He'd sniffed out the leads just like I'd figured he would, and the next stop was Russia. Except, as it turned out, he had no intention of taking me along with him, a fact I didn't realize until he got out of the car, locked it and started to walk away. He was a fool to try to go there on his own, but beyond that I might die inside his fucking car before anybody found me. His sneer was what sent me over the edge, though--Mr. Morally Superior with the Truth on his side. Yeah, right. Social advantage and his education and the fact that he'd lost a sister made him better than me. Sure, Mulder, whatever you want to believe. I'd just spent the last four weeks with a bunch of boneheads who thought that Truth was going to be their savior, too.

I was beyond thinking. I'd taken too much of Mulder in the last twenty-four hours and I just went off--a visceral thing--and let him know exactly what I thought of him.  In Russian. Which wasn't deliberate, but it turned out to be what saved me. Suddenly Golden Boy realized the scum of the earth might be of some use to him after all. Can't tell you how relieved I was to have him open that door again and unlock me.

The flight gave Mulder a chance to settle down, and once we were back on the ground we had the trip to keep us busy. I proved handy enough in locating discreet transportation and I could see Mulder getting more and more psyched up the closer we got. He had no idea what he was looking for, though, or that the prison camp we were headed for was a part of the gulag, run like a gulag camp.  But he'd find that out soon enough. My part was just to act like all this was new, the way I'd played it when we were first partners, and I think he bought that much. 

By now Mulder was in a good mood. He was excited about what he might find. Inside, I could only tense, knowing what lay ahead and hoping if I was caught I could convince a guard to let me see Lev. First chance I got, I'd need to get word to Vasily Peskow, an ex-KGB man who owed me a favor, to take care of Charne-Sayre and her little project. He had a reputation for being discreet and hopefully the distraction would keep the old man from focusing on my possible involvement in importing the rock. With that taken care of, I should be just fine. I'd have protected Mulder from the Oil and made myself the only possible source of a viable vaccine. Before I knew it, I'd be right where I'd always hoped to be.

\------------------------

SCENE: AT CHE'S

_Prior to involving himself with the militia group, Krycek visits his friend Ché, who has established an e-mail correspondence with the outlaw group in Krycek's name._

I glance up from the computer screen and catch him looking.  "What?" I say.

Ché only shrugs and turns back to his sink full of dishes. He cooks when I come to visit, trying to make up for lost time.  He picks a big pot off the counter and dips it into the suds. I go back to my work, catching up on Militia Boy's e-mails.

_...whining about collateral damage but we're really just ants in the bigger picture, right? Move off a few decades and who cries over the woman who got run over by a car or the kid who died at four?_

"Your 'revolutionary' speaks the speech of the speculative, Aleksei."

I look up again. 

Ché pauses, mouth half-open, then turns to stare out the window above the sink.  "A luxury available only to those who do not know life from experience."

"Bonehead ideology," I mutter in agreement.

_But this is the stuff with real media value. It could be the make-or-break factor between getting recognition or not._

Pathetic would-be revolutionary. I punch the 'page down' key and push out a breath. "How much of this crap is there?"

The activity in the sink stops. "32k in text files. Sixteen weeks of correspondence.  At your request."

His last words are spoken quietly, but distinctly enough to send a message.  I frown and wait a moment to look up. His back is to me. He picks up a plate and rubs a sponge across it. My eye catches on the apron and I smile. If I mention it, he'll protest that he gets busy, and anyway, the pocket's handy for a pencil and notepad. It's brown, made from towel material.

"Thanks," I say.  "I owe you."

He picks up another plate, swipes the sponge over it, then takes another and another. One after another they clink onto the soapy stack in the other sink. The last one hits a little too hard.

"Sorry," he turns to say, as if this mess is his fault.

I return to the screen.

_You think Tim McVeigh's name would be a household word if only a bunch of suits had died in that building?_

In my mind a picture forms: the 'quiet room' at the orphanage, about the size of a good shoebox. I'm seven years old. The window's high up and there's no curtain in it; gray morning light pours through and glares off the gray walls and the scratched metal bed frame. I swallow. In front of me Vanya lies on the bed, almost colorless in the washed-out light. He's a year older than I am. I step closer, one careful footfall and then another. He isn't gone yet but he's close; he's got that stare. Each time I've slipped in here I've told myself I have to do it; I have to be able to look it in the face without blinking, like staring down a dog with bared teeth. How else will I survive?

When Vanya's breathing gets loud and ragged, I press hard against the cold wall behind me, wishing I could melt through it and into the hallway beyond. My heart bangs until my whole body shakes and my eyes are pulled up to the shivering leaves outside the window. I stare until they run into an abstract. Only when the room is quiet again can I look down.

I push back abruptly from the computer, cross the room to the window and stare down into the street below. People are beginning to cross at the intersection down the block, bundled in hats and long coats against the cold, but the day's bright, the sky an almost blinding blue. I turn away and go to stand beside the sink. I can hardly blame Ché for being pissed at having to play this stupid charade with Petersen.

I clear my throat.  "You know I wouldn't have asked you to write to this scumbag if I didn't need it."

Sorry excuse for an apology.

"I know." He shrugs and turns away to study the pile of dishes in the drainer.

"Hey, these guys are going down," I say, quiet. "They're not going to do anything to anybody."

His hands go back into the dishwater. Little clusters of bubbles float to the hair on his arms and cling there.  "No, it's necessary work," he says. "No pain, no gain, eh?"

He has this look all of a sudden, the lost look I saw on him when we first met at that gala in Prague, just a second's slip from the teenager's air of confidence and momentum that had carried him. I could have used it against him, what I saw there, or twisted it to some advantage, but instead I'd called in a couple of favors to get the kid to where he wanted to go--America. I had to see what it would do to a kid, you know--to step in and save him instead of step in and use him.

He turns to me now. The eyebrows go up and he forces a smile but his eyes are too shiny. "My father," he says finally.  He shrugs and turns back to the sink. "The news came yesterday."

"They shot him?"

"It was inevitable, I suppose."

Something in my stomach tightens. My hand finds his shoulder. We stand like that in front of the window, watching a truck back into the alley on the far side of the street.

"I'd always hoped"--he shrugs--"to see him once more."

"Could've been worse, you know. They could've dragged it out."  I feel the breath go in and out of me, empty. What would I know about a father you'd mourn?

Ché's shoulder tenses under my hand and I know he's going to need some space. I squeeze once and move away.

"He was just protecting my grandmother," I hear him say as I reach the hallway.

He's told me the story about how she got started, pulling some kid out of the way of a tank during the Prague invasion. How she kept going, whatever little bits of sabotage she could get away with. Eventually the secret police started to notice some of her work, though, and in the end Ché's dad had taken the fall to protect her. Someone from the old regime who still had influence behind the scenes had managed to add to the charges years later, part of a personal vendetta. His dad had been in prison since Ché was twelve.

I go into Ché's room, look at the bicycle next to the bed--the one he uses for runs to the grocery store or for errands. The front tire's flat thanks to a piece of glass he picked up on his last trip out. I turn the bike over and work off the wheel--quick release, just my luck. Rummaging through the desk drawers, I find the patch kit and sit down cross-legged on the carpet. When the door opens I'm sitting there on the floor, waiting for the patch cement to dry. I look up and shrug.

 _Figured you were going to need it_.

That's what I'd planned to say, anyway.  But when I open my mouth no words come. None are needed.

\---------------------------

SCENE: SHADOW AND LIGHT

_Krycek and Mulder on the flight to Kraznoyarsk (*Tunguska) about an hour before landing_

 

"Still feeling sick?" Mulder turns and asks me.

Bad Cop was replaced about two hours ago by a guy who realizes he's going to need my help when we land. Anyway, Mulder's focus is forward now, like a bloodhound sniffing the wind and salivating at what he finds. But his tone catches me off-guard. It almost sounds as if he cares.

I turn away from the gray clouds outside the window and shrug. "What, do I look that bad?"

"A little green around the gills." He doesn't quite smile. "Anyway, I remembered you having a little trouble the last time we flew together."

Mulder stretches carefully against the lack of leg space while I turn away, swallow and study the knees of my jeans. It took me months to remember what happened on that plane.

"You know what was in that pouch, don't you, Krycek?" The corner of his mouth lifts, as if the idea's just hit him.

"How the hell would I know what was in the pouch? Word about the courier just dropped into my lap, a lucky break. It was information destined for the smoking man. I told you I'd give him to you, Mulder."

He sits up straighter. "You haven't given me anything."

"No? Then what are we doing on this plane?" I snort and let my head drop back against the headrest. "Because I've got better things to do with my time."

"Like what? Rot in jail?"

I want to strangle him. "I handed you that group, Mulder; doesn't that count for anything?" My voice spikes and I force it down; it's giving me away. "You have any idea what they were planning? Because I don't think Mayhew plans on talking anytime soon."

He gives me a half-interested look.

"They were going to take out a whole city block--boom! No strategic target, just one hell of a lot of collateral damage."

Mulder's eyes go big momentarily, then he grunts. "Then what were you doing with them?"

"I told you before. They got me out of that silo. I had to act grateful for a while. 'Til I got my strength back, anyway." I shrug. "And then I found out what they were planning. I wasn't just going to let them go through with it."

His eyebrows go up at my last remark but he doesn't tear into it the way I expect him to. Takes me by surprise; I was already throwing up a mental shield. I turn to the window and squint at the sudden burst of sunlight coming through the glass.

"He locked you in there, didn't he?" he says after a moment. I can hear the sunflower seed positioned between his teeth. "Smoky?"

After a beat, I nod. I don't know why Mulder let me have the window seat; probably just so he could block my access to the aisle. All of a sudden memory pulls me toward the terror of the silo. My fingers tighten against the armrest.  Slowly, deliberately, I will the picture from my head.

"It was in you, wasn't it?"

I glance at him, expecting to find... I don't know.  But all I see is curiosity.  As a matter of fact, he's only half looking at me.

"So?"

I study the window edges, the multiple panes of glass and the handle on the little pull-down shade. For a minute I think he's connected the dots--the Oil, me, the rock we're chasing that they're sure to have analyzed by now. My pulse spikes and sweat starts to bead on my forehead. I get sucked so far into my worry that when his voice comes again I nearly jump, though it's barely a whisper.

"What was it like?"

"I'm not going there for you, Mulder," I mumble, and I shoot him a look that warns him to back off. But his eyes are on his tray table. One finger traces the edge of it.

"What was it like?" he says again, as if he's completely missed the chance I just gave him to plunge the knife in and twist it.

His jaw quivers slightly and he sets it. His lower lip pushes forward, the way it does when he's deep in thought. I think he actually wants to know.

"What happened to those other people, Mulder? That woman in the bathroom and her husband, the diver?"

He pulls himself back to reality and glances at me. "They were okay in the end. After a little recuperation time. But they had no memory of the time when they were... possessed by it." He looks at the aisle carpet, then back at me. There's a softness in his face, almost a sadness. "What about you? Did you remember?"

Things went this way before between us, him fighting my intrusion into his little world and then opening up, the two of us beginning to form some kind of team. It had been a start, anyway.

"Eventually." 

When he doesn't say anything more, I look over at him. He exhales slowly, holding back the flow of air, and the corner of his mouth twitches. "What was... How would...?" He sighs and leans forward, breathing into cupped hands. "Would they have done that to a little girl, infec--"

Great, there it is. This is all about her.  You should've known, Aleksei, you starry-eyed son of a bitch.  What he really wants to know is whether it would have taken away his sister's memory of him. If she passed him on the street, would she walk right by without any sort of recognition that there was something between them?

Not easy playing the shadow-brother, is it, Mulder?

"Keep the faith, Mulder," I say when I finally get my mouth moving. "I bet she's every bit as stubborn as you. She wouldn't let go of you that easily."

I glance at my watch and then out through the window. An hour until we land.  Five at most until we reach the camp. Beside me, Mulder reclines his seat, leans back and closes his eyes. I stare through passing clouds. He'll keep toying with the question, wondering whether the Oil ever took her and if so, what it would have been like.

Five hours.

My stomach knots, threatening to mutiny with the memories.  A few hours and he'll be finding out the answer to his question.  

The second hand sweeps steady circles on my watch in ultra-slow motion, like something out of a dream.  _You've got to understand why I'm doing this, Mulder. In the end it's for your own good._   Anyway, you're not the only fool trying to keep a little flame alive.

Mulder shifts in his seat. He swallows and grimaces, little creases forming at the corners of his mouth. 

I swallow, close my eyes and feel the buzzing that rushes through my veins. I tell myself I'm doing the right thing. I'm doing it for his own good.

I've nearly got myself convinced.

End Part 4

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: The X-Files characters are the property of Chris Carter and 1013 Productions, though the real spirit of Alex Krycek belongs to Nicholas Lea, who brought him to such vivid, nuanced life. Ché belongs to me.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Tunguska trip, and the challenge of Krycek's recovery from his amputation

NARRATIVE

I'd spent close to a year planning this little excursion Mulder and I were on. I'd laid the groundwork, planned for contingencies, spent months in the gulag and weeks playing along with Mayhew and his pathetic band of pseudo-revolutionaries in order to set this up so Mulder'd buy it. I'd sacrificed one of my rock couriers and put up with Mulder's holier-than-thou ego trip. By the time we landed I should have been confident about how things were going, anxious to see the rest of it play out. But I wasn't. I was nervous as hell. A weak seam was starting to show in this little plan, and it had nothing to do with logistics or with Mulder changing his mind about where we were headed. It was me, and I hadn't even seen it coming.

It wasn't Mulder's bad cop/good cop turnaround a few hours before we landed; he was going to need me once we were on the ground and he'd be a fool not to realize it. I should have been pissed when he asked me what it'd been like having the Oil inside me, and maybe I was at first--until I realized he actually wanted to know. All of a sudden things were different, as if he were questioning an abductee like Duane Barry instead of interrogating the scum of the earth, which is what I'd always been in his eyes. Mulder'd believed in Barry and he hadn't cared if it showed in spite of the shit it'd gotten him from the agents listening on the other end of his wire.

But being reminded of having the Oil inside me wasn't what I needed just then. I pretty much deflected his question but it was hard to get the thought of the Oil out of my head after that.  Especially since I was the reason he'd be living the alien horror for himself a few hours later.  The fact that I was only doing it in an effort to save him didn't calm the gnawing in my stomach. If not for the focus I needed to watch out for stray roots and tree branches as we ran, I would've been a complete mess. 

As it was, I was shaking inside but I don't think Mulder noticed. He'd made the connection between the Tunguska explosion and the Oil.  Whatever he'd discover here was guaranteed to be alien and that fact alone was enough to keep him headed forward; I was nothing more than a footnote. We dug under the fence together, helped each other across a stream in our path, dove to the ground together when he first caught sight of the prisoners working the quarry. If it hadn't been for the sick buzz I couldn't shake, I would've enjoyed the teamwork. But I knew what was coming. I also knew I was going to have to keep my head to make it past the guards and contact Lev. Without that opportunity, Mulder and I might spend months here. We could die here.

I'd always had a beard when I came to the camp as my alter ego, the go-between for the research's anonymous financier, so it didn't surprise me that there was no recognition at all on the guards' part when they captured us. Mulder'd been whipped unconscious so he couldn't say anything to contradict my story. I told them we were American tourists and some locals in the last town had directed us here, luring us with tales of a fancy brothel hidden away in the woods. Stupid tourists, we'd fallen for it; we meant no harm.

I don't think they bought a word of it, but at least they threw us in a cell together. Mulder was bleeding from where the whip had cut his temple, but it stopped soon enough. I would've cleaned the wound if we'd had any water. Before Mulder came to, they hauled me out for questioning. The way this played out could be critical, because I needed to keep my identity hidden until they'd injected Mulder. Luckily I managed to sound unconvincing in my claim of knowing the camp commander and after some perfunctory threatens, they shoved me back in the cell. Mulder was awake by then and wound up tight. His gut reaction was to take his nervousness out on me but I wasn't about to play his punching bag. Not this time. I needed a clear head or neither of us was going to make it out of there. After a few seconds he backed off.

When they came around again, I knew I was going to have to make my move. The guard was ready to haul me off to be injected and I told him I needed to see the man in charge. I tried not to give too much away in case Mulder knew any Russian, but when we got outside the cell I said I had government friends in high places and if anything happened to me, there'd be hell to pay. He could lose his job... or worse. The appeal to his self-preservation did the trick. He left me with another guard and went away for about ten minutes. When he came back, I was hauled off to the captain of the guard, but the guy was finishing his lunch, so I sat in a locked room for about fifteen minutes waiting for him to show. I tried to stay focused on the arguments I'd have to make, but my mind kept wandering back to Mulder, wondering whether they'd taken him yet. Lev should jump at the chance for a fresh test subject; it wasn't like there was a glut of available bodies. My stomach was knotted from tension and hunger; it'd been way too long since we last filled our stomachs and neither of us had eaten the slop they brought us in the cell. I stared at the window ledge, not seeing a thing, listening to my breathing, fast and shallow, as if it were coming from someone else.

When the captain finally came in, I told him I'd talk only to him, not to his men, and he sent them outside. I said I was doing a security check for the project, that I knew Lev and I had to report to him about the security breach with this foreigner. He wasn't inclined to believe me until I was able to describe Lev's daily schedule, his choices in liquor and the dates of the only week he'd spent away from the camp, when we were at the dacha on the Black Sea. Finally the captain left the room and I spent another half-hour pacing, the minutes barely seeming to move.

It took Lev nearly ten seconds to recognize me. At first he stood there with his mouth open. I read puzzlement, then alarm, then a kind of relief on his face as he finally stepped forward to embrace me. I returned the greeting but inside I was wound like a spring. This was it. It was where I swam or sank.

Lev's the kind of guy who has to know he's got everything's under his thumb: his camp, the vaccine program, his prisoners and staff. But he didn't have a clue what was going on here, seeing me walking out of one of his lock-ups. His gut instinct to crack down and gain control was going to be fighting his need not to come down too hard on me, the source of his funding; the mix could light what I knew was a very short fuse. I was going to have to lead him through this quickly and cleanly. I told him we had a security breach on our hands, that I'd nearly taken care of it when his riders showed up, but now we had a definite problem. Looking concerned was easy. He sent the guards away and took me to his office.

I said I'd just happened to be in New York--lucky break--when a source tipped me about this _americanets_. He was a geologist; somebody'd given him a piece of Tunguska rock and he was on his way to Russia to look for more. I had just enough time to book myself onto his flight, figuring I could talk him out of it on the way over. If I could impress him with the danger of the woods, how easy it would be to get lost, and the fact that trespassing could still equal spying in the eyes of local authorities, he should get discouraged and all I'd have to do once we landed would be to put him on the first return flight to the U.S.

From the way he was crouched down in front of his little fireplace, jabbing at the glowing coals, I knew Lev was analyzing every word I said. Obviously, I hadn't been able to turn Mulder back and I made the mistake of letting the word 'stubborn' slip out. It was Mulder all over, but I knew as soon as I said it that it could be a bad thing. Lev only stared into the fire.

I'd planned to steer the  _americanets_  east of the camp, I said, let him wander in the woods until he'd had enough, then take him back to Kraznoyarsk and make sure he got on a plane. If he wanted to question anyone about the rock, I'd mis-translate and he'd find out nothing. He'd have his little excursion, come up dry and we'd be in the clear with no exposure and no threat of having him return. But then I'd pulled a muscle in my leg and by the time I'd caught up with the guy, he'd found the fence and tunneled under. I tried to get him to leave, but then the riders had shown up. Now damage control was our only option.

Lev had his own idea of damage control: kill Mulder when the vaccine's effects on him had been analyzed and bury his body in the woods. Not possible, I said; he's a professor with high-level connections. If he didn't return, we'd have an international incident on our hands, not to mention domestic publicity that could compromise the secrecy of the work.

Lev was cornered and he knew it. He couldn't afford to let the camp be put in the spotlight. I told him our geologist was quite the family man, that he he had a wife and two little daughters he'd never risk over a chunk of rock. He'd be easy enough to control. Lev stood, dug a cigarette from his pocket and lit up. It wasn't the kind of guarantee he wanted.

My plan? he asked. What did I have in mind?

Leave him in the cell a few days, I said. Let him think about spending a lot of years inside those walls. He'd be ready to deal. Tell him the price of his freedom was forgetting he'd ever seen this place. Then put him on a plane and send him home. Let him know we'd be watching him and his family. Hell, we could even give him a cover story to tell his friends.

I was putting Lev's trust in me in serious jeopardy. I'd never let a security risk go like that and I knew Lev wouldn't, either. But to Lev I was Mikhail Antonovich Sokolov, negotiator, not a hit man. What else could he have expected from me? And exposing the program was something he couldn't chance. Still, I watched every movement of his jaw, every pull of his mouth. As well as I could, anyway. Jet-lag was starting to do a serious number on me and I'd gotten damn little sleep in the past 72 hours. If I looked at the floor tiles at my feet for more than a few seconds, they'd start to waver.

"You," Lev said, nodding at me, his voice suddenly hard. "Why did you take so long to identify yourself?"

"I tried. I kept trying but your guards--" I shook my head and tried to keep my heart from pounding. "They wouldn't listen." I paused. "Did you expect them to listen to a prisoner?"

He shrugged, but the line of his mouth was thin and straight. There was a pop from the fireplace and a shower of sparks flooded the hearth. Lev reached for the screen and set it in place.

"Mikhail Antonovich," he said when he'd settled himself in the chair opposite me. He leaned forward, intense. "You've served in the army. When is it ever acceptable to leave a potential enemy standing, or let him escape?" He gave me a bitter smile. "The  _americanets_  would be pleased to know you lobby so strongly for him."

"I'm just pointing out the only practical option I see to avoid exposing--"

Lev turned and stared at the cold gray afternoon beyond the window. By now my heart was running like a trip-hammer.

"You look pale, tired," he said when he finally looked back at me. "Perhaps you should rest. We will speak of this later."

Time was the last thing I wanted to give him; he'd have a chance to rethink everything I'd said, to find the holes in my story. But we were two men sharing space on a tightrope. He'd had to bow to me because of my connection to the money and because he knew he couldn't afford to let the camp be dragged into the spotlight. This was my cue to bend. If I questioned his authority or judgment now, it would only make me appear disloyal. Maybe even suspicious. And he was probably right about the way I looked. My whole body was buzzing, exhausted.

"Belov will take you to a room," Lev was saying. "Rest. We'll talk this evening."

All I could do was nod acquiescence. Belov showed up and took me down the hall to a small room with a bed, a chair and a little window that looked out over the central courtyard. I started to think about Mulder, where he'd be right then, and realized I'd better not even start. There was a knock on the door and an old man appeared with a bowl of stew. I ate quickly; it was only the third passable meal I'd had in as many days. I flashed on Mulder. They wouldn't be giving him any of the stuff I got... if he was even conscious. I stood up, reminded myself to stay focused and set the bowl outside the door. Then I took off my boots and hung my jacket on the back of the chair. The smart thing would've been to spend the time strategizing, to go back over everything Lev had said and figure my possible moves and countermoves, but the fact was I could hardly keep my eyes open and the room was cold. I spread the extra blanket on the bed, got under the covers and felt myself start to slip away. I told myself I'd think better on a clear head. Anyway, I'd done what I could. The next move belonged to Lev.

When I woke, it was after nine. I wasn't ready to announce myself by turning on the light, so I lay there in the dark, thinking... or attempting to. My mind was thick. I'd only begun to catch up on the sleep I needed. Lev could have decided my story was full of holes by now. That remark he'd made about me defending Mulder... I couldn't afford to have him question my loyalty. If it came down to a sacrifice, how far would I go? Would I leave Mulder here, let him be killed, if that's what it took to save my tie to this program?

I couldn't afford to get emotional; too much was at stake. Besides, what I sometimes saw in my mind--Mulder and me moving in the same direction--was the remnant of a kid's fantasy, a brother I'd constructed in my head. Experience should have shown me how unlikely that scenario was. Hell, if he had the chance right now, if he could speak Russian and Lev would listen, Mulder'd find a way to crucify me.

I got out of bed, put on my jacket and found myself at the window, staring up at the stars. I tried to marshal up the memory of every time Mulder'd turned on me, or let me down, or beat me up, but damn if the picture stuck in my head wasn't of the old man's smug smile, that pseudo-benevolent thing I'd hated so much when he'd visit when I was a kid. As if it pained him to leave me there. As if he were making those trips for  _my_  sake.

But what was I supposed to do? I might not have a choice and I wasn't Mulder's fairy godmother. 

But I wasn't the old man, either. I'd never be like him.

The room felt like a cell. For a long time I paced, willing the old man's image away. Finally I turned on the light. Within a few minutes, Lev was at my door.

Was I feeling better after six hours' sleep?  _Your_ , he said-- _your americanets_ \--and my mind wasn't working fast enough to protest the connection.  But it didn't matter; he had a plan. We'd tell Mulder he was going home. We'd take him to Kraznoyarsk. He'd be crossing a street and have a little run-in with a truck. The circumstances would seem obvious, there'd be no evidence of what he'd come for, or that he'd ever been to the camp. Lev would make sure there were witnesses to the accident.

"I will need a few days to make arrangements." Lev paused and raised an eyebrow. "This is much better, is it not, Mikhail Antonovich? To be assured that the threat is truly gone?"

I made myself nod agreement. I think I actually looked relieved. At least he didn't seem to suspect me. And we had a few days. It'd give me a chance to think up a plan for Kraznoyarsk.

Lev took me to his office and we shared drinks, then he sent me back to bed because it was pretty obvious how wiped out I still was. In the morning I was still moving a little slow, but I figured I'd be here a few days; I'd have plenty of time to catch up on lost sleep. And Mulder should be okay for another couple of days. Lev couldn't afford to hurt him before we left here. He'd want to make sure an autopsy wouldn't show anything that would raise a red flag. If Mulder and I left the camp intact, we'd have a chance. I had enough money in the bank to buy any kind of witnesses and story I wanted to leave behind, though I knew Lev wouldn't send the two of us off alone. He was cautious. He'd send someone along to make sure his agenda got carried out, but at least we had a starting place.

As it turned out, it was a careless mistake that set things in motion that morning. Mulder wasn't supposed to be in the loading area. There were orders to leave him in his cell, but apparently the word didn't reach the right guard. So I never even saw Mulder coming. I was joking with Lev, who was in good spirits thinking his crisis had passed, and then Mulder was on me with a homemade knife, the brother who, as usual, wanted nothing more than to kill me. He knocked me into the truck bed, stunned me and took off before I could get my bearings. By the time I could think clearly enough to worry about the cavalry Lev would be sending after us, it was time to bail from the truck because the brakes were gone. As I rolled toward the bushes, I thought about Mulder barreling down that road, about the irony of all the planning I'd done to bring him here, only to have him take off and kill himself in a truck with failed brakes.

I had no idea the danger would turn out to be mine, not his.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

I'm not going into the details. I've replayed the whole thing a million times in my head but you know, it hasn't ever changed the facts. Not one damn bit. Things come and they go. Even parts of your own body. It's a possibility you don't think about until it's happened.

We'd been taking locals when we were short of test subjects, so I guess we had to figure there were people out there hiding from us, or doing what they could to avoid being turned into guinea pigs. But I didn't know anything about the men with the missing arms. Lev did, but I didn't know that until later. I guess I could have put two and two together when they found me--the fact that they wanted to help me, the fact that none of them had a left arm. But who'd believe a man would go that far--cut off his arm to save himself? Anyway, you know what they say about hindsight. At the time, my worst fear was that somehow they'd figure out who I was, that I was in some way responsible for the tests that were taking their friends away. And I hoped more than anything that Mulder had more than one life and that he'd survived the runaway truck. He needed to make it out of this and as far away as possible. Besides, if he were caught and they found someone to translate for him, he could undo all the groundwork I'd laid with Lev over the past year. My tie to the project would be history.

What I should have done was go right back to the camp; it would've allayed any possible suspicions that I was helping Mulder. But I didn't want to give Lev's men a lead on Mulder they might not already have. And the one-armed men found me pretty quickly; I'd messed up my right shoulder falling from the truck and I wasn't moving as fast as I would've liked. These guys knew from experience that if anyone escaped the camp, Lev's men would be crawling the woods in no time, so the first thing they did was take me to an underground bunker. We waited until their scouts spotted the search party and knew which way they were going. After that it was a matter of skipping from place to place, a rotating group of about six of them tucked away in with me in one bunker or another while the rest spread out as scouts, keeping an eye on Lev's men or bringing food from some household willing to help out. We must have changed locations at least half a dozen times before dark came and Lev's troops finally retreated to the camp. By then word from the grapevine had it that Mulder'd been found and was being hidden, too.

In a way, the one-armed men reminded me of the Afghanis I'd seen in the war. Watching your back is second-nature when you grow up in a place where big brother's always got his eye on you--maybe through the babushka upstairs, maybe through your best friend, and you never know who you can trust. But these men were bound together by the threat of a common enemy. This was their fight; it was their lives. And nobody forced them to stop and help me. I'd be nothing but a liablilty to them if I were found, able to identify them and the locations of their bunkers. But the fact that they'd gone out of their way for me was making my situation a lot stickier than it should have been. I needed to get back to the camp, especially now that I knew Mulder was safe. Lev needed to see me and be assured I was on his side in this. But I couldn't just walk away from where I was. I had no viable excuse for leaving and besides, my shoulder hurt like hell. It'd only gotten worse as the day wore on and once we were able to safely build a fire and eat, I was exhausted and the vodka they gave me made me drift off telling myself, the way I had the night before, that I'd be able to think up a better plan in the morning.

Funny how things work out.

It's a toss-up which was worse when it happened: being invaded by the Oil or what went on that night. But it's a stupid comparison in the end. When the Oil left, I got my body back intact. After that night in the woods, I wasn't ever going to be the same.

A couple of minutes after they cut into me I passed out from the pain and believe me, it wasn't any too soon. When I came to I was in another underground bunker, alone. I had no clue what'd happened the night before but as soon as I tried to move, the pain hit me and I passed out again. The second time I was awake long enough to realize what they'd done to me. I lay there shaking, just a constant thing I couldn't control, until the hatch to the dugout opened and an old man slipped inside. He took the bloody rags off the wound and bound it up better, then gave me some vodka and before I knew it, I was headed back to outer space. I heard talking but I couldn't make out what was said, or who might have been there beside the old guy.

Next time I came around I was with a boy of eleven or twelve who was either holding me prisoner or looking out for me, I wasn't sure which. My arm was gone and I had no idea whether these guys knew what they were doing when they cut me or whether I was infected or dying or just in shock. But if hell was real, I knew what it felt like to be in it. In Afghanistan I'd seen the badly wounded begging for death. I'd even shot that captured woman to stop what they were putting her through. I could understand being overwhelmed by the pain and I knew what it was to be backed against a wall. But I'd always figured I'd hang in there somehow, that I wouldn't be one of those men who gave in. 

All of a sudden, though, there in the dugout, it was pretty damn clear how little l'd have to lose by letting go. Maybe that realization was just as terrifying as the mangled body I'd been left with: that my life and all my struggling and planning had gotten me nowhere. I'd made my debut on this planet courtesy of a mistake made by two pathetic excuses for human beings and after thirty years of running a treadmill, I was being pulled apart like a bug in the hands of a cold-eyed kid.

I don't know what kept me going but it wasn't force of will; I had none left. The kid who was with me came closer, gave me some water mixed with vodka and I drifted off again. When I woke the next time, I must have been on automatic. One thing played over and over in my head: that I had to get out of there and back to the camp.

(Click [here](http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/ak5alyosha.htm) to go to the vignette '[Alyosha'](http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/ak5alyosha.htm) that chronicles this part of the tale.)

The interim details are fuzzy. The two things I recall are the pain and working to convince the kid to take me back toward someplace I figured I'd likely be found. Last thing I remember was the gravel surface rushing up at me as I made it to the road. When I woke up, I'd been two days in the camp infirmary. Andrei was looking down at me through a haze. I couldn't make out what he was saying but I knew he was being way too calm, way too soft with me and that meant something was wrong. Eventually I was clear enough to realize what that something was.

I must have gotten out of hand, because every time I got to that point of realizing what'd happened, there'd be a needle and then nothing. So for a long time I was like a drowning man barely surfacing, bobbing up and then getting sucked under again, each time getting a clearer glimpse of the surface but not reaching for it, either. Why would I? It was a nightmare out there.

It had to be a nightmare.

Eventually I was forced to the surface, though. Andrei let the stronger painkillers wear off and I was left staring at a bandaged lump, a sick substitute for the arm I depended on. Five days: I was five days in an ongoing hell that didn't show any signs of letting up, or dissolving into a reality I knew how to deal with. My body was weak from the trauma and messed up from the anesthesia and drugs I'd been given. Andrei had reworked the hack job the guys in the woods had done on me, which shortened the stump by another inch and a half, but eventually I was going to need a prosthesis and my self-appointed surgical group hadn't used enough finesse to allow for that. It was more than I could wrap my mind around: a piece of plastic, like something you'd pull off a store mannequin. What the hell would I do with one of those?

They moved me into a room of my own once I was strong enough to stand up and move around a little. Lev would come by to check on me and let me know the latest on the hunt for the men who'd cut me. Andrei would drop by, too, as much to play therapist as doctor, though he hid it well enough. He'd try to sprinkle a little encouragement over me and then back off, while Lev was all grim efficiency, doing his damndest to show his loyalty to me and the money I represented. 

They didn't find Mulder, not that Lev didn't turn the area upside down. There was blood in the truck when they found it. I said Mulder could have crawled off and died somewhere, or fallen into one of the creeks; it was late March and they were running pretty full. It would've been easy enough for his body to float away. I reassured Lev that if there were any kind of American inquiry, my employer would make sure the camp was never mentioned. I was hoping he'd back off so Mulder'd have a better chance of getting out. If he was still around here, that is. Or if he hadn't died from blood loss if they'd done to him what they'd done to me.

I kept with the program: ate what they gave me, did a little exercising to regain my strength, walked the hallways. Whatever it took to keep them happy and make them lay off me, because the thing I wanted most was to be left alone--no fake conversations, no special treatment, no attempts to rationalize away my situation. In the end, Lev and Andrei weren't going to be able to make this adjustment for me, master this life I'd been dumped into half-handcuffed. I worked on my balance and I worked out ways to do things I'd always taken for granted--zipping zippers or buttoning buttons or making a piece of paper stay in one place while I wrote something down. But how many times can you practice that kind of stuff? Especially when you're staring at an almost-new pair of boots you know you're never going to wear again because the last set of laces you were ever going to tie, you tied a week ago. I spent a lot of time sitting, staring out the window into the camp courtyard. Sometimes I thought. A lot of times I just let my mind go. I took the sleeping pills Andrei gave me. I went to bed early and got up late.

From my window I'd watch them load up quarry workers and move work crews around the camp itself. There were breakfast lines and dinner lines and the ever-present packs of gulag dogs straining at their leashes, waiting to wrap their jaws around the first poor son of a bitch to step out of line. Some career, if you think about it--some legacy--to breed dogs to be the jaws that let men in power distance themselves from the brutality they dish out. It's what I'd been for the syndicate: one of the dogs who did the dirty work so the inner circle could go home without blood on their hands and drift off to sleep secure in their delusion that they were saving the world.

My mind drifted, one image leading to another, and I let it, though I steered away from ones that were likely to kick me in the gut. I thought about tossing a baseball with Tyler Phillips. It still impressed me, the team the two of them had been--the way Carrie'd worked with him. I wondered what Tyler'd gone on to after he finished that miniature town he was building. I wondered what it'd be like to have somebody you could count on the way he could count on Carrie. 

The kid in the dugout--Aleksei--hadn't been able to count on how I'd react. Some job for a kid, leaving him with a man in that kind of shape. I didn't remember what I'd said or done to make him suspicious, but then I didn't recall much of anything beyond what my body felt like and the need to make it to the road. I'd probably scared the hell out of the kid, though, in the shape I'd been in. I was lucky he hadn't taken off on me a lot earlier than he did. No telling if anyone would've found me in time, or what Aleksei's buddies would've done if they'd been the ones to run across me.

I thought about the vast expanses of Alberta, watching them from the open door of a rolling box car, and a clone girl with dark hair restless in her sleep in a bunkhouse. I remembered waves breaking ice-blue north of Malibu after dark and I remembered Mulder getting out of the pool, dripping wet and ready to play hostage negotiator, though they were using him. Laughing at him. He didn't give a damn what they thought.

The truck driver's gone, Lev said to me over dinner on the sixth night. He'd disappeared with his wife and son. When they'd gone looking for him, they'd found the house empty--no people, no clothes, dirty dishes in the sink. I remembered what the boy had said. I remembered the look he'd given me when he thought it was my brother who'd taken away his friend's livelihood.

Each day my body was a little stronger, but mornings were still a bitch, waking up all over again to the bandaged joke hanging from my left shoulder. I'd get up and focus on making it through my paces to show them I was okay. Then I'd retreat to my chair and space out. It was a relief--to just pull in and drift. I was a spectator, no demands on me, and that was fine. It should have had me worried, but I couldn't muster the effort to care. It took Andrei to give me a little wake-up call.

"This is not like you, Mikhail Antonovich!" He was shaking the empty sleeping pill bottle in my face; each of the past three nights I'd taken a double dose and used them up early. "You know there's a danger of addiction. Besides, you of all people have work to do."

What the hell did he know about what I did, or had to do? 

He told me about his brother who'd had his leg blown off in Afghanistan and still managed to help save a comrade. In the hospital he'd gotten himself a wheel chair and gone on doctoring the wounded. I didn't give a damn; I wasn't his brother. But the fact that Andrei's kid gloves were off was a relief; I was tired of being treated like a piece of porcelain. I told him I wanted to be alone. He just stood there, not budging. My last ounce of composure was slipping away and I gulped against the pressure, but a kind of strangled gasp came out of me, which only sent me downhill. Andrei turned away and looked out the window to give me some privacy.

It was the pain, I ground out when I'd finally pulled myself together a little. I'd wake up at night feeling like my hand was being crushed in a vise--the one I didn't have anymore. That was one part of the problem, anyway. I didn't mention the nightmares.

He said the ghost pains were my brain trying to adjust to the cut nerve endings. There were ways to cope, he said. Different approaches helped different people. He'd work with me.

Then he came up with a new prescription: we were going to take walks. Okay, I figured; what the hell. Maybe it'd be better than the chair and four walls I'd memorized like a map. Maybe it'd shake me out of this limbo I was in. So we started to go out every morning. He'd take me away from the compound and onto the paths that went into the woods. Made me nervous as hell at first, knowing what had happened here, but the steady movement--one leg in front of the other--was good. The forest and the wind were good; they made me realize I was still living in the world. Andrei would go along pointing out birds or insects or the odd salamander as we went. At first I only listened to the sound of his voice. Eventually I started to hear what he was saying. He was concerned about the research--not just the vaccine but what it was preventing. He knew about what had happened to the Vaneks. He figured heat had to be the key--the heated lab the gestating sample had been kept in. In the camp they'd never witnessed the kind of development that killed the Vaneks, but the facilities where the Oil was kept and used were usually pretty cold.

"But, think: the disaster waiting to happen, Mikhail Antonovich, if the Oil were to be transported to someplace more temperate? Surely your employer must recognize this." He'd stopped in the middle of the trail. "He must be a man who understands the implications of this organism. Perhaps there is even some personal encounter that fuels his devotion to this cause."

I felt naked suddenly, as if he could see inside me and know just how close to the the truth he'd come. All I could do was swallow and nod.

"Then you understand. The importance of this research is far beyond the absurdity of developing it as a potential weapon. We could as safely breed wild dogs and turn them loose, expecting them to attack only our enemies." He paused and nodded toward me. "You have important work to do. Sometimes we must press forward not because we have strength, or will, but simply because the work demands to be done."

Back in my room, in my chair, Andrei's words ran a loop in my head. In my whole life I probably hadn't come across more than a dozen people who'd be worth saving from a sinking ship. I'd seen a hell of a lot of the opposite. So maybe it was Andrei's conviction that was carrying me and not any of my own, but I started to pull myself together. The world hadn't stopped turning because of what had happened in the woods that night; I was still going to have to deal with the world. If I got going, started moving forward, maybe I'd find a way to shake this half-dream I was stuck in. I still had strategic pieces on the board. As far as that went, I should be in better shape than before. I had to assume that Mulder was still alive. He was with people who'd keep him away from Lev's men; he'd find a way home. Vasily Peskow would've taken care of the little assignment I'd given him; he was dependable if the price--or the stakes--were right, and I'd made sure they would be. Which meant the syndicate's research would be back to square one. They'd be plenty eager for a vaccine now. Somehow the prospect of breaking into the inner circle didn't excite me the way it had before, but it was a means to an end--the next step.

I needed to check in with Peskow. I should contact the Brit, too, but I wasn't about to attempt it from the camp. Lev was a smart man; any calls I made would be tapped. But I couldn't afford to hang back until the advantages I had were gone.

By then I'd been two weeks in the camp. My stitches had just been taken out and the stump didn't hurt much... well, not if I was careful with it, and not during the day, anyway. I was off the sleeping pills and I'd started to get used to the looks I got when Andrei and I would go walking. Some men noticed and others didn't. Of the ones that did, most looked away and pretended they hadn't seen. But this was a prison camp, and I was on the side that wielded the power. It would be different in a city, all kinds of people watching. I wasn't looking forward to their stares, and I damn well didn't need their pity.

Andrei was torn between wanting me to stay a few more weeks to make sure I didn't show any signs of infection and wanting me to get going with what needed to be done. But the stump was healing well, Andrei'd taught me a couple of methods for making it through the bouts of phantom pain and I'd promised him I'd check in with a doctor at the first sign of anything going wrong. As I packed to leave, I felt a lot like a guy waking up at the crest of a roller coaster, already starting that downward plunge without having made the choice to be there. But since when does life wait until you're ready to face what it throws at you? 

I got on that plane for St Petersburg and did the best I could. I didn't look forward to showing up on Peskow's doorstep at such an obvious disadvantage. The power balance between us was a touchy thing and while Peskow might be old, he was like an old scorpion. But it would be weeks before the stump was in any shape to be fitted for a prosthesis. In the end I think Peskow was impressed that I showed up without one. Inside, I felt like I was freefalling, but as long as he didn't know that, what difference did it make?

While I was in St. Petersburg I looked up a friend of Andrei's who had some background in prosthetics, but the choices were more than I was ready to deal with: cosmetic arm, mechanical arm, myoelectric arm. In the end they all had their advantages and their drawbacks for the user and I guess I still wasn't ready to see myself as three-quarters of a man dependent on a piece of plastic. So I put the decision off. Petrovich heard I was in town and he stopped by to see me, but later in the week he tried to send me a get-well gift, a little company for the evening. I know he meant well but I just about choked when I opened the door. The girl was gorgeous. I remember turning sideways in the doorway to hide my left side and then stumbling through some kind of excuse--something had come up at the last minute and I was on my way out to an appointment. I gave her a tip for her trouble, closed the door and collapsed against the wall. A few seconds later my legs gave out and I slid down to the floor. I sat there shaking, tears running down my face.

If I'd stayed in that room, I think I would've shot myself. Instead, I put on my overcoat and went out walking. The sun was just setting and buildings, sky and snow were stained a cool, frosty pink. I made my way along the canals, keeping up a steady pace. In my mind I could see Andrei gesturing with his usual intensity, though I didn't hear a word he was saying; it was like a movie with the audio shut off. When my legs were tired and my breath was coming in frosty gasps, I stopped by the railing. 

The street was deserted, the only sound the occasional echoing crack of the ice starting its annual break-up in the river. I'd always been on my own but standing there, I was completely alone, one poor lost son of a bitch in a hollow world of ice and concrete. Maybe this was how it would be for the last guy standing after the colonists had dropped down from the skies and done their thing.

I shivered and watched the sun slip below the horizon. Not because you have strength, or will, I could hear Andrei say, but because the work demands to be done.

I turned and started back in the fading light, but I hadn't gone more than fifty yards when I saw something go down in the shadows at the far end of the block. When I got closer I could see it was a girl of maybe fourteen or so. She'd fallen and spilled a string bag full of little packages into a snowdrift by the curb. She was just lying there, sobbing, and she was nothing to me--just a grating noise I didn't need to hear. But the next thing I knew I was helping her up and gathering what I could find of her stuff. She put her things back in the bag, but the wrist she'd fallen on was swollen, so I ended up with one handle of the string bag and she took the other and between us we got her things up the stairs to the entrance of her building and inside the door. Before she could turn back to get a good look at me, I was outside again, my feet crunching snow in the dark.

Back in my room, I warmed myself by the radiator, swallowed a little vodka and crawled into bed, thankful for the down comforters I was wrapped in. When the phantom pains hit in the middle of the night, I started to massage the stump the way Andrei'd showed me, but what helped more than anything was a passing memory that hit me, Patty and I making love and laughing over some silly thing tha had set us both off. It was the complete opposite of the frozen moment I'd had a few hours earlier by the river. The picture itself was gone in seconds, but it left a spot of warmth behind, like coals in a fireplace, and I fell asleep loose and peaceful for the first time in months.

Morning threw me back onto that plunging roller coaster, though, when I made my call to the Brit. Pescow must have been losing his touch in his old age, because somehow they found out he'd killed Charne-Sayre, and the Brit realized right away who was behind it. His shrewdness showed, though, because he realized I wouldn't destroy both Charne-Sayre and her work unless I had something better to offer in the way of a vaccine. He was mad as hell about his lover, but not enough to make him lose his focus on the bigger picture. Unless I cooperated, he'd let the old man know I was still alive and what I'd done. I asked him about Mulder, trying to keep it casual, and he said Mulder'd shown up in the middle of some Senate hearing where Scully'd been stonewalling for him, and whatever it was they'd been trying to pull out of her about my rock courier got lost in the confusion. He didn't say anything about Mulder showing up one-armed, so I guess I had my answer there. Somehow my golden brother had ended up on the better end of things once again.

Actually, I tried not to think much about Mulder because when I did it was hard to escape the glaring fact that if not for Mulder attacking me and stealing the truck in one of his typical knee-jerk moves, I'd still have all my limbs. If I'd known this was the price I'd pay for a chance at his loyalty when things got tough...

Bah. Even thinking about it is quicksand.

I hadn't been looking forward to bringing Ché up to date, but in the end I couldn't avoid writing him. I got myself a laptop--one with a single latch for the screen, so I could open it--and sat around pecking out a mail with two fingers. I kept it brief, just said I needed some information on prosthetics--who was good, where few questions would be asked. I knew I wouldn't be fooling him. He'd connect the dots and then he'd worry about me, though it wouldn't come out in words. He'd just send the information I asked for and do the agonizing on his own time. 

Sure enough, he came through for me. Two days later I was on a plane to Brussels.

The first few days were a little overwhelming. I felt like a lab sample under a microscope. Everything was the arm: measurements, charting, testing, comments about stumps and sockets and training passing from one lab coat to another. My conscious mind was telling me to step forward, to help them give me the best limb they could from all this, but another part of me was laughing like a loon at my show of optimism. A piece of plastic would never make me what I'd been before. It would never sense the spring in the trigger of a gun or know the heat of a woman's flesh or have the strength to push away an arm jammed against my throat. But I couldn't afford to listen to that voice. It would only pull me into a drowning pool and there'd be no Andrei this time to drag me out.

There'd be a week before they could start fitting me, so I forced myself to focus on learning as much as I could about my options in hardware. In the end I surprised myself by choosing the middle option, a basic mechanical arm. I figured it was a place to start; the hand would open and shut, it'd be something to brace a piece of paper with when I wrote, or hold a door ajar, or do any one of a dozen other everyday things I'd lost the ability to do. It wasn't any bionic wonder, but it wasn't nearly as heavy or as complicated as one of the high tech arms and I'd fill out two sleeves again. That in itself was critical; it would keep me from standing out, something I could afford to do even less than before with only half my former ability to defend myself.

I started physical therapy sessions, but they didn't exactly fill the day. In my spare time, I made myself start thinking ahead. More and more, I wondered who Mulder's source had been, the one who'd ended up supplying our travel documents. Was it somebody he could actually trust or one of the syndicate's people pretending to be an ally? If it was someone from the group, they'd know I'd been with Mulder and exactly where we were going. They could have had somebody on the plane with us, watching, or had a tail ready to follow us once we hit the ground. Beyond that, anyone following closely enough could have traced me to Brussels. But I didn't think so. If the syndicate had a line on me, they would have killed me already. They had no love for me and if they'd managed to find out about the tests and the vaccine, they already had everything they needed. The only logical thing to do would be to kill me off, the sooner the better. The old man could renew his ties to the program and be their in. The fact that I was still breathing indicated that they probably didn't know about me.

Whoever Mulder's source, though, I needed to find out what I could about him, how much he knew and who he was likely to share his information with. I remembered the street and building number where we'd parked that night, so I sent the address to Ché in the hopes that he could pull up something about whoever lived there. But it was a high-rise; it was almost a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. Still, if there were any way at all to get that information, Ché would find it. I wondered again what it was that had made me offer to help him that first time we met. Or what had taken me up to that girl who'd fallen in the snow in St. Petersburg. Actually, my head was filled with questions I couldn't even begin to answer.

I worked hard at my physical therapy and I worked hard at practicing with the new arm they were building me, but every step forward seemed to come with at least one step back. While I was practicing picking little wooden blocks off a counter, the voice in the back of my head kept whispering that no matter how good I got, nothing I could ever do with this glorified pair of tongs was going to be enough. I just put my head down and muscled through the best I could. And to fill my spare time, I did what I'd done in St. Petersburg: I walked. In the chill of early spring I could go out in an overcoat and people hardly noticed the empty sleeve. Sometimes when I caught sight of myself in a mirror I had to laugh, though. There I was, Mr. Respectable with the neat haircut, the expensive coat and slacks, and shoes to make the Brit jealous. I could have been some successful businessman: normal life, country estate, picture-perfect wife and kids waiting at the front door, half a dozen calls queued from people wanting to make deals. Everything a man could ever want.

Right.

Like my life--my world--was anything like that.

After the first week, I'd had my fill of city streets and squares and monuments, but I still needed to keep myself moving. One of my doctors suggested a private tour company, so I did a little research and found an outfit that would send me a car and a driver. I came to depend on Dirk. He had a good sense of when to talk and when to leave me alone. Anything away from the city, I told him; maybe the countryside suited my sense of isolation. He'd pick me up every morning at ten and we'd take off, out of the city and past farms and fields and old estates. I'd keep my mind on the scenery and eventually Dirk would pull off the road near a lake or a field or the dunes near the shore, places that were pretty much deserted in the still-chilly spring, and we'd share the food his wife had packed for us, and then I'd walk until I tired myself out. Sometimes I'd fall asleep on the way back to the hospital.

By mid-afternoon it was fittings, practice with the arm, rechecking of the socket, dinner, and maybe a little bit of conversation with the old white-haired guy who'd gotten a new leg and always asked how I was doing. He had an arm missing, too, one he'd lost in a military training accident in the '30s. He'd tell me war stories and then switch to tales about his grandchildren. Every time we talked he'd give me this look, a kind of twinkle in his eye, and say, "No wife? No children?" as if I were holding out on him. Did I really look like I could be that kind of guy? But then I guess everything about me looked pretty normal then--on the outside, at least. At another time in my life I would have considered the old guy a pain and avoided him, but for some reason it made you feel a little better just to see him sitting there in his chair. As if something were right in the world.

They'd given me a prescription for sleeping pills but I didn't dare fill it, though most nights I'd find myself awake in the wee hours from a bout of phantom pain or one of the jolting little scenarios my mind would come up with--my night in the woods, or the Oil flashbacks that'd decided to start rerunning themselves just for the shock value. When they weren't too bad, I'd lie there thinking and when they were worse, I'd get dressed, go downstairs and walk the maze of hedges in the courtyard garden. I'd think about the old man, what gave him the contentment he seemed to have, or I'd think about the girl in the snow. Yelena--that's the name a little kid had yelled from down the hallway when we'd gotten inside the building. I remembered her eyes, the wariness when she'd first seen me, not realizing I was only there to help. Would she have just lain where she was and ended up with pneumonia if I hadn't come along? Was her life not worth getting up out of that snow bank for? Could be the old story: parents married to the bottle, kids left to fend for themselves. And was her life any better or worse for my having taken a hand in it? Had I sent her on to something good or something she dreaded?

What were we doing on this rock in the first place when nearly everything about our existence was a deck stacked against us? What did it take to have something to live for, the way Andrei or his brother seemed to, instead of just living to avoid dying, or being stepped on, or crushed?

What had kept me going all these years and where was it now?

So many questions, and none of them ones I could answer. But the walking and the cold air seemed to settle me anyway. By the time I went back up to my room, I was ready for sleep. If it was a good night, the last image I'd see would be of Dirk's three-year-old daughter. We'd stopped by one day to check on her because she'd been sick, and Dirk's wife had brought her out to the car. She'd just reached out to Dirk and lay there draped over his shoulder with these pink cheeks and bright, wet eyes as if she were a part of him, totally content in spite of the way she must have felt. He was her shelter and she was safe; it was that simple.

By the time I left, I'd spent a month in Brussels. I can't say I'd resigned myself to the status quo, but I had a prosthesis that fit me and I was getting used to using it. I needed to find out who Mulder's contact in New York was, because my safety might depend on who he was connected to, though after weeks spent in the clean, orderly world of the hospital and my Brussels persona, heading back into the mine field that was my life seemed almost surreal. Before I left, I wished the old white-haired man well. Dirk and his family had been on my mind all that last week. On our last ride together, I left him a little bonus with a note to start a savings account for the kid.

It was time to bite the bullet and stop in at Ché's. Hopefully he'd made some progress at cracking the mystery of the New York informant. I wasn't looking forward to knocking on his door, though. I'd gotten used to the people in the hospital, and the looks of strangers in the street--when they noticed anything about the arm at all.  But Ché was the first person I actually knew that I was going to have to face. Couldn't be avoided, though, so I gathered my things together, reserved a private jet to make myself harder to trace, and took off for D.C. I figured a week at Ché's, then a few days in New York to track down this source of Mulder's and decide what needed to be done about him, then on to the next thing.

Wrong again. I guess by now I should have known.

\-------------------------

SCENE: ALYOSHA

_A young boy is charged with tending to the recently amputated Alex Krycek_

From the corner of the dugout, I watch the fingers of light creep from one beam to the next along the dirt wall. When the light touches the third board, Olga comes with a cloth bag. She hands it down to me and runs off quickly, not stopping to talk. She hasn't seen the man I'm watching but she knows what has been done to him.  She has no desire to see another like her Uncle Vanya. 

The form in the shadows moans and then quiets again. I strain to hear Olga's footfalls until they disappear in the distance. I picture her: long legs flying, blonde braids flapping behind her like ropes. Olga runs like a deer. When I can't tell whether the sound I'm hearing is Olga or the pounding of my heart, I open my eyes and reach into the bag. A little pot of something warm and fragrant is nested into the hollow of a round loaf. The soup is for the man, but if Yuri is right, he won't eat much. I pull off a little piece of the warm loaf and chew on it, waiting. For short periods the  _amerikanets_  is quiet. At intervals he half-wakes and cries out but this is not pain; the pain comes in deep grunts. When he mumbles, he uses the words of schoolboys. He calls out to someone named Vlad for help, thinking he is being bullied.

I get up and stretch my aching legs; they prick as if from a thousand tiny pins until I lift them over and over, marching silently in place to recover the circulation. Then I pause to listen, as I must do often. From the corner comes the faintest sound of breathing. Overhead, there is nothing but the light crunching of a bird poking through leaves at the surface. Yuri has said someone will be watching us, but if the search party were to find him... I swallow and squat down, staring into the shadows. I want the  _americanets_  to wake up so I will not be alone, and yet he will not be pleasant to deal with; I know this already. But it will be better than the thoughts that fill my head now, of the men on horseback coming, hauling us up out of the shelter of the dugout and carrying us away to the camp where the terrible tests slowly kill people.

For the first time I notice two shining spots watching me from the shadows and hear labored breathing. I jump. My heart pounds but I force myself to speak.

"You are awake?"

The  _americanets_  groans. When he tries to roll toward me he chokes on a cry and then falls silent, gasping.

"It will get better," I say, though I know my words carry no power to take away his torment. "Are you hungry? I have--"

"Where... where are we?"

I point to the light filtering through the hatch above us. "Below. Safe."

He starts to roll toward me but leans on his other shoulder, also hurt. He groans and retreats to his back, panting. Even from where I am, not close, I can see the wet trails that run down his cheeks. I look away and turn my attention to Olga's bag. My stomach is half hunger and half sickness from listening to the man; each breath he takes seems to fill me with his pain. My fingers reach into the bag and pull off a small piece of the nearly-cool loaf. In the corner, the  _americanets_  stares at the place where yesterday he had an arm.

"You will be safe now," I say when I've finished chewing my bit of bread. "They cannot use you for the test now. You will live."

"Got to go," he says, still staring at the spot. He had no time to prepare; perhaps he still believes it is only a bad dream. "I didn't need to be safe here. I've got to go back... home... to America."

He starts to move again and then stops, mindful of the pain, and stares at the ceiling.

"There is food," I say, pointing to the bag. "You should eat."

He shakes his head.

"You must."

"Can't."

I shrug. "It does no good to be saved and then invite death--"

"I didn't need saving!"

He half-rises and curses at me using words the men only whisper if I am around. The force of them backs me against the damp earth wall. I shake and tell myself it is only his pain speaking. Yuri told me this: do not be afraid, the pain makes them wild. They will come around in time. They have no choice.

The  _americanets_  quiets and closes his eyes. Slowly I squat again. He is shaking now. I reach for the blanket I've been using, swallow and lean forward.

"You must stay warm," I say carefully. "I have another blanket."

I wait to see what his reaction will be. He says nothing, makes no movement.

"I will bring it to you--"

I half-stand and move slowly, one step and then a pause and then another. When I have reached him I bend down on one knee and start to set the blanket over him, covering his feet first, then his legs. I take care not to look at his face. When I lift the blanket toward his chin, he grabs my ankle hard. I lose my balance and fall backwards, hitting my head on the pole in the center of the dugout. When I cry out, the pressure around my ankle only tightens.

"Show me," he says.

I try to pull away but his grip is like a steel trap.

"Show me!"

"What? Show you what?" I struggle to sit up.

"Your hands--"

I hold them up, my fingers shaking; the  _americanets_  stares as if he could burn holes in them. My ankle aches. It throbs like the ticking of a clock and my whole body is beginning to shake like his, but he seems not to notice. Sweat blooms on my forehead and starts to run.

A choking sound comes from the man and he releases my ankle. I scramble to the far corner of the dugout and press myself against the damp earth. The ladder is near his feet; if I were to try to get to it, he might rise up and grab me, and it will be hours yet before Yuri or one of the others returns. Unless the men on horseback come first, and then we are all lost.

I squeeze my eyes closed and try hard to think of home--Anton and Dima and Nadya and I working on our building project. Dima didn't want Nadya included because she's a girl, but she brings the nails and so he has learned to put up with her. I listen to the sound of our pounding and our chatter and when they finally fade, I hear the quiet sobbing coming from the shadows across from me. The sound is soft, barely there, but I cover my ears; he is a grown man, after all, and I am ashamed to witness his pain. I look upward and make myself focus on the dust specks dancing slowly in a shaft of light.

When finally all is quiet, I loosen a little.

"Food?" The voice from the shadows is thick, unsteady. "You've got something--?"

" _Da_."

He takes the pieces of bread I hand him, torn from the center of the loaf, the part that will be easier to chew. I hold each piece at arm's length and let go the second he takes it; I will not chance his iron grip again. After five or six pieces he doesn't ask for more. But I am supposed to encourage him to eat.

"There something else?" he says, sniffing. "I smell something."

"Soup," I say. "But for soup you must sit up."

He surprises me by not refusing. He struggles until he's propped himself against the wall but it's taken all his strength. He sits there shaking, unable even to hold the spoon and I must feed him, slowly, awkwardly, until he says no--no more. He will throw up.

He closes his eyes and rests his head against the wall behind him.

"What were you doing here?" I venture. I have only seen Americans once before. It is not Moscow or St. Petersburg, this place I live in.

"Came with a fr--" He looks at me and stops. "My brother dragged me here. Just... hiking. Never should've--"

"He is your brother, the other one?"

"Huh?"

"The one who crashed Kirill's truck."

"No, he--" He glances toward the streaks of light in the ceiling, then closes his eyes.

"Kirill is in danger now. No truck, no value to the camp... He's my friend's father," I add softly.

The  _americanets_  only frowns. After a few moments he pulls himself up straighter, leans on his remaining arm and winces.

"Hey, help me here, will you?"

"What do you want?"

"I need some fresh air."

"You can't go up there. The men with the horses--"

"Look, kid, I'm going to puke right here if I don't get some fresh air pretty soon. How long are you going to want to sit around here after that?" He is weak but his words are strong, impatient.

My nose wrinkles. "Maybe," I say, "if we only lift the hatch a little--"

"Help me."

He holds out his hand, but in the end it takes much more than a hand to get him upright. I must put my arm around his waist and let him lean against me; we struggle awkwardly trying to rise and I cringe inside as his efforts pull me against him. I can smell his shirt, and the blood from his wound, and his stale breath laced with the vodka they gave him afterward. When finally he is on his feet, he continues to clutch at me. If I were to let go of him, he would soon collapse.

"You won't make it up the ladder," I say. "You will fall and your arm will be much worse."

He pulls me closer. His body is hot, feverish.

"No. Got to go up."

"I am supposed to protect you. I cannot tell--"

"Look, I'm going to be sick." His body sways. "I've got dollars... American dollars... in my pocket. More money than your family makes in a month. Think of what you could buy. Just help me up this... fucking ladder." His breath comes in gasps, heavy with pain.

"But--" I am not sure whose reaction I will fear most: Yuri's if I let this crazy  _americanets_  be captured after all their trouble, or that of the stranger I wish I were far away from.

Before I can find anything else to say, he leans toward the ladder. I must step toward it to avoid falling and so we reach it. As he grabs a rung with his hand, I step back, finally free. The _americanets_ leans forward against the ladder and pants. Then one leg rises tentatively, searching for a step. He does not reach high enough.

"Kid--" He half-turns. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Aleksei."

He turns back to the ladder and shakes his head.

"Help me," he says, "Aleksei. Come on. Put my foot up."

It is not only the first step he needs help with. Each time I must not only lift his foot, but then push him up until his hand grasps the next rung. When he reaches the top and tries to push on the door, I am sure he will fall off the ladder with the effort and come crashing down on top of me. But somehow he manages. The next thing I know, daylight floods the dugout and the  _americanets_ has thrown himself outside on the surface. I scramble up the ladder to find him lying on his back, panting. He stares at the tree tops as if his focus could give him the ability to fly up and away to America.

"You must come back down," I whisper from between gritted teeth.

He says nothing but only pants, eyes closed. Tears run past his temples and into his hair. I look from one tree to the next, searching for movement, my heart pounding like a runaway horse.

"Which way," he says, "to the road... the... the road I came on? How far?" His eyes are open now. They are dark green, like hard emeralds, and bore into me.

I shake my head. "You do not understand. The men from the camp. I cannot--"

"I... I need to find him."

"Your brother who crashed Kirill's truck?"

"He didn't. That... that wasn't my brother. That was someone else."

But I know the driver was American. How many Americans can be here in the woods?

"My brother, he... we got separated... near the road. I have to--"

"The search parties have been everywhere.  _We_  have been everywhere. If your brother was there, someone would have found him."

He only shakes his head, rolls painfully and manages after some effort to sit. He is very pale.

"Which way?"

"It isn't safe. You are not strong enough--"

He leans toward me and catches me by the arm. "Do you have a brother, Alyosha? Would you leave him behind?"

His breath warms my arm; his fingers pinch and I squirm. "No. I mean, I have a brother, yes, but--"

"Which way? How far is it?"

"To the road? Nearly a kilometer."

He pushes against me to right himself. "Hand?"

I stand and take the hand he holds out, then struggle to pull him upright. It is madness, what we are doing. If he faints along the way, I will run. I will tell Yuri I had no choice.  I cannot let the guards find me and make me tell about our men and the dugouts.

We move slowly. The  _americanets_  uses me as a crutch, his arm around my shoulder. Three times we stop when he can go no farther. I take  him off the trail and he lies in the bushes on his back, staring up. He refuses to close his eyes.

If there is water nearby, I bring him some and when his panting has quieted, we go on. The final time, when I return with water, he greets me with the stem of a plant he has plucked from beside him. When he names it, something inside me grows cold. How does he know this word if he is from America? Are the plants there not different? And his speech flows so easily. The only foreigner I ever heard spoke like a child, grasping for words. He called me Alyosha by the dugout, I realize now, and how did he know I am called that? I told him only Aleksei.

"Ready?" I hold out my hand.

He is growing weaker; I must lift him and I nearly fall before he is upright once again. On the path he drapes over me and I want only to run, not only because he is too close but because a terrible thought has occurred to me: if it is all a lie, if he is not actually American but Russian, lost in these woods but not one of us, he could be from the camp. He could be a guard, injured and lying so we would not kill him. From the road he could find the camp and tell the others about the dugouts, about Yuri and the men. About me.

When we are ten meters from the road I can make myself go no farther. The man leans against a tree on shaky legs, resting, but when he calls for me, the words come flying out of me before I can think: _vy ne americanets! You're no American_. When I realize what I have said, I turn quickly and run as if he were a demon from a fairy tale who could grow wings and pursue me. But I know he is only a man. I hear him shouting after me-- _Alyosha, Aleksei._

When I know I am far enough away, I slip under some bushes, shaking, and wait to catch my breath. My eyes squeeze shut but behind them I see a pale, weak man with only one arm collapsed on the ground. I tell myself he does not deserve my help, that he is dangerous, but finally I can stand the picture in my head no more. I get up and start carefully toward where I left the man, taking care to stay hidden. Finally I see him. He is staggering up the rise to the road but as I watch, he stumbles and falls in a heap on the ground. I think he has passed out; perhaps he is dead. But a minute later he stirs, then rises and makes a second attempt. This time he takes only three steps before he collapses and disappears from my view. I wait, counting the seconds, but he does not rise again. I tell myself to go, I have no further business here, and yet something draws me closer to the place. When I am perhaps a dozen meters away, I hear the rumble of a truck. I duck down behind young trees and watch as the truck stops suddenly. Three men rush out and look at a spot in the road. Perhaps they have hit a deer or found something fallen from another truck. But no, they are lifting something, carrying it. It is the man; they are laying him in the bed of the truck, talking excitedly.

I do not wait to see whether he is known to them. I turn while they are occupied and run as fast as I can for home. The men, when they hear my story, are furious; they tell me I am lucky to have gotten away. If they had known, they would have taken more than his arm. But that night--no, not just one night, but for several--I see the man in my dreams: lying in the dugout, struggling along the path. I try to watch for signs of who he really is, traitor or no, but I can never tell with any certainty. And from Ivan, who works in the camp, we have learned nothing one way or the other.

Two days later I find myself wandering the woods near the dugout, walking the trail the man and I had taken. At our final resting place I stand and consider the stranger yet again. My foot pokes at the layer of dead leaves in front of me and I notice something green in with the brown, the corner of a piece of paper, folded. I reach down and pick it up. It is money--American money. I cannot read the lettering, but in each corner I recognize '100'. I do not know how many rubles it is worth; he could easily have lied to me, or the bill could be counterfeit. I put the money in my pocket and when I reach home, I work it into a chink in the flooring beneath my bed. 

But in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, I find myself on the floor, pulling the mysterious bill from its hiding place.  I tell myself sternly that it has no power to reveal anything about the man's intentions.  And in the end what does it matter whether his story was true or not? Life is full of deception, a walk through a dark woods filled with creatures waiting in ambush.   

But perhaps this is exactly why it matters.   
  
In my mind I see the man's pleading eyes. I feel again the intensity in his voice when he questions me about my brother, then offers payment for my help. My fingers tighten around the foreign bill as if they could squeeze from it the stranger's secret. 

\------------------------------

SCENE: SOLITUDE FOR TWO

_The awkwardness of Ché and Krycek's first meeting after Krycek's amputation eases when the two fall into conversation late at night._

 

_(Imagine an accent. Ché is from Eastern Europe.)_

Something small is tossed from behind the couch as I enter the living room. It hits the bookcase and bounces off--a crumpled piece of paper. I ignore it and go to the computer, where I check my upload. The rate is good. By sitting down, I could casually glance toward the darkened end of the room, where the couch has been turned to give Comrade Krycek some privacy on the spare mattress behind it. But it would be a deliberate invasion of his privacy. I cannot bring myself to do it.

Instead, I make my way to the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil and reach for my favorite cup. What sounds like a grunt comes from the far end of the room, though I cannot be sure over the low rumbling on the stove. The noise increases and before the whistling can start, I switch off the burner and pour the steaming water over the tea ball in my cup. Gradually the water is stained a deep, fragrant gold. We have done everything right, Krycek and I, since he arrived this afternoon, and yet things are not right. I find myself walking on eggshells, as they say, and Krycek is strangely subdued. It has been like this from the first, when he knocked on my door.

 _Hi_ , he said. He managed a bit of a smile. Then we embraced in the usual fashion, but I was more careful than usual, and it did not escape me that his left arm rose only as far as my elbow. I looked at his bag, then at him, and he spoke of it immediately, which was a relief.  _No point dancing around the obvious_ , he said, and I asked what had happened, and he told me the story of the men in the woods, though what he was doing in the woods and the nature of the experiments the men were trying to avoid, he did not mention. I hear only fragments of any of Krycek's stories. Sometimes--possibly most times--I realize I am better off not knowing the details he omits. 

But I digress. He described for me the month he'd spent in Brussels, and the process of fitting an artificial arm, and the experience of learning how to use it. He demonstrated the clasping motion of thumb and fingers. Like tongs, he said. As if it were nothing.

Which of course it is not.

The building? he asked then. Had I discovered who might be Mulder's contact? His bag was immediately deposited beside the couch, his overcoat came off, we sat down at the computer and looked over the information I had gathered. For a few minutes there, working together, I saw the man I've always known: strong, focused.

I dip the tea ball absently in my cup. Across the room, a shadow rises from behind the couch and disappears into the hallway. The bathroom door closes. I squeeze a little lemon into my tea and take it to the computer. Settling myself, I pull up the file listing the occupants of Krycek's New York building and begin to work my way through the document yet again. I have never before known Krycek to wear anything resembling pajamas. Indeed, his appearance this afternoon surprised me, the dark suit and fine silk shirt, though the first time I saw him--in Prague--he was dressed formally. But I have become used to the man in the leather jacket and faded jeans. That man I know. As well as one knows Krycek.

The sound of flushing comes from beyond the hallway and suddenly it strikes me how very difficult it must be to pull up a pair of pants--even of the elastic-waisted variety--with only one hand. A moment later Krycek returns to his mattress. I stare at the list on the screen. My guest says nothing but merely disappears from view. Jet-lag, he'd said when he retired to the mattress several hours ago. It is the first time he has ever felt a need to excuse his silence.

Dinner was where the awkwardness began. Usually we have more to say. Some convenient detail is seized upon and used for conversational material: the countryside beyond Prague, the pitfalls of bureaucratic institutions, or the recipes of my mother, whose specialties I have reproduced to the best of my ability for our current meal. The progress of the soccer season. Krycek seemed to have little heart for small talk this time. But then he has never before come to me after losing an arm. Perhaps he understood how carefully I planned the meal to avoid any awkward moments--stew with no pieces large enough to need cutting, garlic bread that had been already sliced and buttered before it was heated. Perhaps my forethought offended him.

A sigh comes from beyond the couch, accompanied by the sound of blankets and pillow being repositioned.

"You are warm enough back there?"

"Yeah. I'm okay."

I refocus on my document.

More sounds of restlessness come from behind the couch and finally there is silence. A moment later my neighbor's footsteps can be heard coming up the stairs. She pauses on the landing. Something--no doubt a bag of groceries--thuds softly beside her and a key is poked at the lock. She needs new glasses; I have watched her squint, focusing on the keyhole. Next month, she says. She is saving for the cost of the exam.

"Would you do it again?" comes a voice from the shadows. "You know--if you could've seen ahead to how things would play out?"

I turn, surprised. "Do what?"

"Hack those files."

"Which?"

"The first ones. The Prague files."

My mouth opens, but he continues.

"You know, if it meant the difference between... say, between seeing your father again--having some kind of regular life--or not." A pause. "Or just being able to stay in Prague, not having to deal with the craziness of getting used to a foreign place--"

"You mean, like trying in vain to find good  _palacinky_?"

"Yeah, like trying to find  _palacinky_."

I wait but nothing more is said.

"We were not allowed to see my father anyway," I begin. "It was a deliberate part of the--"

"I know, but--" He pauses. "Is it worth it, I guess? Are you satisfied with what you've got, what you're doing?"

My eyebrows rise involuntarily.

"Is it enough?" he says.

"Enough?"

"Enough for what it's cost you?"

Krycek's words hang in the quiet that follows. From the sound of his voice I know he has turned again on the mattress. Now he sighs. His tone has been quiet, pensive, not the voice of certainty I am used to, quick to decide or command, or taut with frustrations whose origins I am left to guess.

"There is no denying the trouble I would be in in Prague, comrade. Or rather, the prison I would be in. Here I am safely anonymous. It was the only way."

I switch off my monitor, make my way through the darkened room to the couch and settle myself on the rug in front of it.

"There was this old man in Brussels," Krycek's voice comes again after a long pause. "Old guy. White hair. Lost an arm in the thirties and they'd just taken one of his legs. Used to tell me stories about his grandkids--"

I lean back against the couch and let my head fall against the seat cushion. An arc of light from the street lamp outside reaches toward the far corner of the room.

"Ever think about settling down?"

I pull myself upright. "Me?"

"There somebody over there besides you?"

I shrug. "I would not object if the right woman came along. But I am not the social type. I'm... a geek; you know that. I would require a woman open to foreigners, who was not put off by men with very pale skin or the intrigue of the internet."

"You could wow her with your cooking."

"Of course. Why not?"

He is laughing at me now--not laughing, but there is a quiet chuckle to his voice.

"No, I'm serious. You could. It's good stuff. Good stuff," the words echo again after a pause.

I lean back again and stare up at the ceiling.

"My father," I start, and take a moment to picture him, "was able to send us letters from time to time. The ones they officially allowed him were censored, of course, and said nothing. But there was one guard who would occasionally sneak correspondence to us. They were very precious to us, those letters; both my father and the guard could have been shot had they been discovered. My father was very firm, always, in his beliefs. He told us to bear up, that it was because he loved us that he was in prison, that sometimes life makes our intentions and our realities appear to work at cross-purposes. Often I have thought about this--whether I did the right thing in coming here, in leaving my mother to go forward not only without a husband but without a son as well. Yet I have done so many things here I could never do in Prague. I have the ability to make connections, to trade information that has benefited many struggling people, a great satisfaction for a closet revolutionary such as myself."

I glance toward the window. "As a boy I wondered why my father must show his love in such a way, by being absent from us. Now I have seen the other side of the coin, you know? And yet still I wonder how much my family has suffered so that I may attain this other success, this gain." My eyes close. "How is my mother's resolve now, knowing my father is finally gone? If I were there, would her burden be less? But there is no way of knowing." I sigh. It is difficult even to picture her properly anymore; it has been nine years. I open my eyes and watch the slight red glow on the curtains turn to green. "One of the things my father said in those letters was that our sufferings often build within us unexpected strengths. The muscles we develop in trying to scale the impossible peak are nonetheless strengthened for other tasks as well."

I pause. There is no reply. The breathing coming from beyond the couch is steady and light, but it is not the breathing of sleep. Quite obviously, our conversation is at an end. I get up from the floor and go quietly to the bedroom where I confront a pile of unfolded laundry. I work through the items absently, picking up one after another. I have not seen this before, Krycek asking questions that reveal him. I move from one task to another, organizing, cleaning. Before I know it, half an hour has slipped away. It is then, when a stack of clean towels takes me to the kitchen, that I hear his breathing again. This time it comes in short, painful gasps.

"Aleksei?"

"Yeah--"

"Is there anything I can get you?"

"It's just... There's this pain sometimes. Hits at night, mostly." He sits up in the shadows and I can see him rocking back and forth. "In Brussels, I'd go out walking... in the courtyard... like a labyrinth, this garden full of little hedges--" He stops and swallows another breath. "Can't do that here, under the old man's nose--"

I murmur agreement, though my mind is fixed on a box sitting in my hall closet. This is the appropriate time. I leave the room, retrieve the item with some trepidation and return, reminding myself, as if I did not already know, that he will not want an audience. He does not like to be catered to. But is it preferable to let him suffer? I step forward and make my way around the end of the couch.

"I came across something that may help," I say. "Try this." I hold it out.

"What is it?" He glances up. Pain glistens in his eyes.

"A special kind of fabric. Here--"

He takes it.

"They weave it from steel and nylon. How it works is not completely understood, but many people find it takes away this kind of pain. It is suggested to wrap it around your... what is left of your arm."

I swallow but he seems not to have noticed my blunder. He does as I tell him. After a few moments he eases himself down against the pillow.

"You find this online?"

"Where else? The world at one's fingertips." I pause a moment. "Do you feel anything?"

"Seems... better. A little better, yeah."

I excuse myself and turn to go.

"Hey--"

I glance back. He doesn't turn or look up.

"Thanks."

"No problem."

I return to my room. Ten minutes later when I approach the doorway again, I am met by the sound of shallow, even breathing. Coming close, I find Krycek on his side, mouth slightly open, asleep and apparently peaceful. I pull the blanket up farther around his shoulders and pause above the shadowed form of my friend. He has always been strong-willed, determined, hard as a diamond. I myself treat him carefully, as I would a loaded weapon. But the kind of strength he has honed in the past will do nothing against this new adversary. 

And yet he possesses other strengths of which he is perhaps unaware. I remind myself that this dangerous man is also the one who saved a seventeen-year-old boy from sure ruin in his own country by bringing him here to safety. For all I owe him, he has never demanded any pound of flesh in return. Surely that is a strength. It is a building block.

Sleep, Aleksei. Morning will come soon enough.

 

End Part 5

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Krycek returns to the U.S. after his amputation, intent on finding the source who helped Mulder get to Russia. Subsequent negotiations with Marita Covarrubias take an unexpected turn.

NARRATIVE A

_Collaboration with Marita Covarrubias through *Zero Sum_

 

It was an afternoon flight--coming across the Atlantic--and I remember looking down at the expanse of water, thinking how fast we were going but it was almost like sitting still because there were no markers, no signs to measure your progress against. Mostly, though, I thought about the guy the co-pilot saw when he'd come back into the cabin every once in a while to see if there was anything I needed. I'd used a lot of covers over the years--diplomatic errand boy, lab gofer, FBI agent, businessman--but this role I'd been playing out for the past month was the one I still had trouble wrapping my mind around: Mr. Respectable, minding his own business, good wool suit and overcoat, fine leather gloves, a man people treated with respect and smiled at because they had no reason to be afraid. A guy nobody spit on or yanked into a dark alley, beat the shit out of and left there bleeding into the gutter. Before Brussels, when had anybody ever asked how I was and looked like they gave a damn about the answer?

It could be addictive, that kind of thing.

It could dull you, too, and I couldn't afford that. Maybe in some parallel world it would've been okay to indulge, but the future was coming and it made all the difference. It was the center of my life, the invisible hub that moved whatever I did.

I'd planned to spend the flight strategizing, figuring out how to find this source of Mulder's, laying out my options for eliminating him if he was a threat. But my efforts kept getting overlaid with images of the old woman who sold flowers on the corner outside the hospital, or a little kid in knee pants chasing a bird across a cobblestone square, or Yelena glancing toward her apartment with a look I couldn't read. Eagerness or worry? I could never figure it out. And why the hell did I keep trying? One thing was for sure: it was going to take a lot more than lecturing myself to get back into the swing of things. And I needed to be back in. I wasn't living in a cease-fire zone anymore.

Staying with Ché made me realize just how much privacy I'd had in Brussels in spite of the doctors and aides and therapists and prosthetists. There was no garden to walk in if I woke up in the middle of the night now, nowhere to escape to when I felt like crawling the walls; I was in the old man's backyard and I couldn't afford to be caught wandering around. Not that Ché didn't make things as convenient as he could. It's the way he is--a lot of forethought and all his bases covered. We were a little awkward at first, the arm the unspoken center of our conversation, but gradually things smoothed out. He'd located the New York building's owner, a Manhattan investment company, and hacked their files to get a list of tenants and the information they'd supplied on their applications, including jobs and credit references. From what we could see, six of them might have potential value to Mulder. But before I headed for New York, I had some other checking to do.

It had been two months since Mulder and I left for Tunguska and who knew what he'd been up to since then. In spite of my mind's desire to do a detour around any subject that included Mulder, sticking my head in the sand would be both stupid and dangerous. I could only hope Mulder hadn't run into the old man and accused him of masterminding our little trip. Some way for the old man to find out I was still alive. I could picture him turning livid and sputtering. Though if Mulder  _had_  spilled the beans, I probably would have felt the old man's sour breath on the back of my neck before this. Anyway, I needed to find out what Mulder'd been up to. He could be like a pup tracking through wet paint.

I hauled my listening equipment out of storage and spent a little time in the coffee shop across the street from Mulder's, assessing my options for placement, but my planning was jolted by the sight of a guy I recognized from my Academy days coming down the front steps of Mulder's building. I called his license plate number in to Ché. It was registered to the DOD--agency carpool. For the life of me I couldn't remember the guy's name, but then I flashed on a thought that made my stomach tighten. Knowing Mulder rarely showed up at home in the middle of the day, I tossed on the hat I had with me and slipped into the lobby. The mail for the apartment next to Mulder's went to a Mildred Somebody--likely some old lady--but the mail for the apartment above was addressed to a William Thompson. The missing puzzle piece dropped in: the guy's name had been Tom Williamson. Unless I was way off, it was more than just a coincidence; the DOD was watching Mulder. But why? Was it just more of the old man's surveillance or was somebody else after Mulder, too, and if so, what did they want with him? The old man had plenty of pawns inside the DOD but there could always be some other group interested in Mulder that I didn't know about.

A little poking around upstairs yielded the fact that there was a convenient utility closet in the hallway right around the corner from Mulder's place. Took me two trips but I was able to set up my equipment on a dark shelf above the mop bucket and cleaning supplies. A couple of days of audio ought to give me an idea of what he was up to.

After 24 hours, though, nothing had registered on my machine, so Ché went digging and found airline reservations to Albany, New York, for Mulder and Scully the day before, just as I'd arrived in D.C. But the next day he came up with something more, something that could be critical in the long term. In poking around in a federal database, Ché'd found some new additions to the medical information in Scully's file. She had cancer, recently diagnosed and apparently inoperable, and the prognosis wasn't good.

Wild card.

Of course, I knew about Scully's implant. It'd be like her to have it taken out if she found it, and I knew what that meant. I'd never made it high enough up in the group to have anybody sit down and spell it out to me, but I'd heard the talk in meetings. I knew what happened when the chips were removed. What was it going to do to Mulder when she was gone?

The first time I met Scully, she'd offered me a gloved hand she'd just pulled out of some dead guy's gut. Looking back, I don't think she was trying to freak me out; she was just wrapped up in what she was doing. You've got to wonder what it takes to pick a job like that. But she's that way--immersed. Ms. Justice Crusader, fight for the right and all that. Even if she does refuse to believe a lot of things that are plain as day before her. She can be a real bulldog.

It was obvious that day who the partners were, and they weren't me and Mulder. The two of them had this intensity thing going when they focused on each other, but it wasn't what you'd think at first; it was all business. Their little joint crusade, or whatever you want to call it. Maybe that's what was keeping them joined at the hip because by any standard of logic, nothing else made much sense. Scully was the brakes on Mulder's runaway car and you'd figure he'd resent that, that he'd bark at her--after all, he couldn't just haul off and smack her around the way he did me--and she'd get to where she'd be fed up and leave. But maybe part of him realized he needed that, that without her he wouldn't last long before he'd overstep the official line and the Bureau'd boot him out. As for what she got from working with him, I didn't have a clue. But she had all the instincts of a mother wolf when Mulder was in danger. She hadn't wasted any time in showing up once he'd set foot inside that travel agency where Duane Barry was, even though they hadn't been official partners for months. She was a skeptic and she didn't buy his theories, but for some reason she believed in  _him_  and for a guy like Mulder, that could count for a lot, especially when everyone else around him was always laughing at how full of shit he was. 

Except, of course, that he wasn't. He was on to the unbelievable truth and he was stuck with the consequences. Sometimes I forget how much that counts for--that he didn't grow up with it like me, hadn't seen what I'd seen, but still he believed. In spite of what it had cost him.

Having her gone--or watching her die--could break the guy.  If you asked him, he'd swear his focus was on Samantha, but Scully had to be more real to him by now than the kid sister he was never going to see again. If Scully died and Mulder went postal in his own way and ended up getting booted out the back door of the Hoover Building, what would he have left? Would he go home, turn on the gas and stick his head in the oven?

I didn't need a lecture on what it was to bottom out. But he'd be no use to me dead. And Scully... even though I was lower than pond scum on her scale, her concern about 'justice' always made her keep Mulder from beating me up too bad. Or killing me. She'd actually saved my life that night outside Mulder's apartment and I still had no idea why. Granted, if she was quick enough she'd have known that Mulder using my gun could implicate him in his father's death. But she could've shot me just as easily as she'd shot him--first round into Mulder's shoulder and the next into my chest. Only she hadn't.

I sent the Brit an anonymous message saying I had exclusive information he'd be interested in. The idea was to get him to come to me alone, without an entourage. I wasn't hot to face him after what I'd done to Charne-Sayer, but there were things I needed to know, to draw out of him, and I needed to see his reaction. We met in Central Park in the middle of the day, kids just out of school for the summer skating by and old people sitting around on benches. I could see that look in his eyes when he first caught sight of me, as if he'd bitten into something fiery, but he stifled it well enough. Truth is, he didn't have much choice. I had the key to the vaccine and if he wanted it, he was going to have to play along. And he was my best bet. I wasn't giving what I had to one of those stuffed suits who believed the colonists' line about exemption from what was coming.

If the Brit knew where I'd been--where the vaccine was coming from--he did a good job of hiding it. He didn't look at my hand, and when he finally noticed, he seemed genuinely surprised. Which I hoped meant the group hadn't been following me. He broached the subject of my having a vaccine, and I said there was potential, that the vaccine was close but not quite ready, that it was going to be tricky to get ahold of but I was positioned pretty well. I wasn't worried about him spilling word to the group. He'd lost his trust in them a long time ago.

I asked casually if Mulder'd been sticking his nose into things, and he said two weeks earlier somebody'd broken into a research facility, a fertility clinic the DOD was running in Pennsylvania. Mulder's fingerprints were found around an interior window but he hadn't done any follow-up that they could tell--no inquries to Senate committees, no formal questions to the DOD or anyone inside the Bureau that they knew of. Given the timing, I can guess what was occupying his mind. The Brit didn't say anything about Scully so finally I asked him if they knew about her condition. He said the old man had mentioned it in passing but that it hadn't garnered much comment from the group.

She's more important than they think, I said. In terms of her value to Mulder she was, anyway. Without her, he might be the proverbial man with nothing left to lose, more dangerous than they could imagine. Could her condition be reversed by replacing the chip? He didn't know, but he seemed to be thinking about the implications. Maybe, he said finally, he could suggest something that would lead the group in that direction. If the opportunity presented itself. If he wouldn't be singled out for bringing it up.

There was nothing I was going to be able to do directly. I had no access to the chips and I wouldn't have known what to do with one if I had it in my hand, short of buying off a syndicate doctor and having him put it in her. But the security around those guys since Mulder'd stumbled across the train car operations the year before was unbelievable. The risk of exposing myself would be too great. Hopefully the group would find it in their own best interest to take care of Scully's situation.

My little chat with the Brit was a success as meetings go. We closed still on working terms, each of us holding cards and needing the other's cooperation. When we stood to go, the Brit hesitated a moment and then said he'd been contacted the day before by a man who claimed to have knowledge of the colonists. When he'd gotten my note, he'd thought I was him. He had no idea who the guy was, if he was on the level or someone's plant, but when he found out--if it panned out into anything--he'd let me know.

Then we shook hands and went our separate ways. Or at least, he did. I turned a corner, then doubled back and trailed him for a while to make sure he wasn't meeting anyone and sending them after me. When I knew I was safe, I grabbed a taxi, went back to my hotel and lay down, thinking about the next day's little project--to root out Mulder's source. Without realizing it, I drifted off. Dreamed I was back in St. Petersburg. When a knock came on the door to my room, it was Yelena. She was carrying a ragged baby on her hip and said she needed help downstairs; there was something wrong. I threw on a coat and followed her down, but when I got there, she'd disappeared. There wasn't even a footprint in the snow to tell she'd been there. The street was silent, not a sound anywhere, then suddenly there was a roar like the cracking of ice in the river only louder--deafening, like the whole city was coming apart.

I woke up in a pool of sweat, gasping. After a minute I went to the window and looked past the buildings and the bustle down on the street to the setting sun. I wanted to be able to walk, the way Andrei and I had walked at the camp. I'd fallen asleep with the arm on and the stump was sweaty and starting to ache. The Farabloc Che'd given me was back in D.C. I made myself take a shower, then I dressed again and went looking for the workout room, thinking I'd use a treadmill for a while, but when I got there, it was locked up. They were cleaning inside.

Back in my room I thought of a little brown-haired girl I'd seen in the elevator half-hiding behind her dad.  She''d looked up at me with big eyes, serious as anything. Broad face, rosy cheeks. Not anything like the kids you see in orphanages. I wondered if the Brit was in this for saving anyone beyond the grandchildren whose pictures hung above the mantel in the Colorado house. What was the chance of doing anything on a broad scale even if you wanted to--say, enough to save a few million people? Or a couple of hundred thousand? How would you choose? What would it take to cook up that much vaccine? How would you distribute it?

The Brit had actually shaken my hand. Could be it was just a snow job, or maybe he was admitting I was a player now, somebody to negotiate with instead of step on. Not that I was going to delude myself into thinking he'd have offered the hand if he didn't need what I had.

There were too many chances of things going bad, too many variables. If Scully died, Mulder might end up a basket case. Or he might do something stupid and end up in jail somewhere. That'd be a switch: me free and working behind the scenes and my misguided idealist brother wearing an orange jumpsuit and chasing his slimy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with watered-down Kool-Aid. Who knew what this DOD surveillance on Mulder's apartment was all about, or what it'd lead to. Were they trying to catch him at something or did they have another plan in mind? And the Brit--he might be dealing now, but what was the likelihood he'd share what he found out from this new potential source... or anything else he didn't absolutely have to offer me? He wasn't in this to play my fairy godmother.

It was starting to kick back in--the instinct to protect myself first and foremost. I must've been dreaming to even entertain the thought that I might be able to survive some other way.

I got my gun out of the bottom of my travel bag, and the solvent, and my cleaning rod and brushes and rag and laid them out on the table. It was going to be a bitch cleaning the thing with one good hand and one excuse for one, but I had to be prepared. Mulder's contact was my next project and he needed to know from the start that he wasn't going to get the upper hand.

\---------------------------

SCENE: TO THE EDGE

_Krycek finds much more than he bargains for when he goes in search of the contact who helped Mulder get to Tunguska._

Three floors before I get to where I'm going, the last passenger--a fat little sausage of a man--gets off the elevator and leaves me alone, thank god. I need the space. Yesterday was a bust, the first four of the six leads on Che's list taking me exactly nowhere. Two more chances today and if they both wash out, I'm up Shit Creek.

I lean back against the wall and stare up at the light panels overhead. It could be a woman, Ché keeps reminding me whenever I refer to Mulder's contact as 'he', and he has a point, but for some reason I've got this picture of a guy in my mind; don't ask me why. Maybe just wishful thinking. Maybe I'm hoping I won't have to hassle with another woman like Maria Ivanova. At the moment, though, Ché's running a fifty-fifty chance because I have a woman from the U.N. and a Russian guy who teaches at Columbia left on this list. And I'm damn tired of this building and the stupid door-to-door routine but I don't see that I have a choice; I can't afford to call ahead and give these people the lead time they could use to set me up.

The elevator settles, I pull myself upright and wait for the door to slide open. Showtime.

The first sign I've hit the right place is the way her eyes widen suddenly when she sees me. But she hides her fear soon enough, everything smothered behind a cool exterior. She has a mannequin's stare. Gray eyes and pale lips fill the narrow opening where the door's ajar. Her look of recognition slips through me like an elevator starting down too fast.

"I need to talk to you," I say in my best match-the-suit-I'm-wearing voice. There are questions I need answered and whatever happens--however this turns out--I can't do anything out here in the hallway.

She purses her lips and starts to swallow but catches herself. "I thought you might come." Her jaw tightens. She makes no move either to open the door or close it.

My hand twitches in my pocket. I hope there's some nice, easy way to resolve this because I don't feel like shoot-and-run today. I'm out of the habit.

The seconds tick away.

"In my work, it's important to be thorough, Mr. Krycek," she starts suddenly. I nearly jump. "Understanding a situation, its background and implications. I believe we may have some matters of mutual interest to discuss." She pauses and pins me with those pale gray eyes. "Just a moment."

The door goes nearly closed. I suck in a quick breath of air but my heart's banging away like an empty drum. I feel like a spider suddenly pinned by a fly.

Or another spider.

A chain clanks out of its slot on the other side and the door swings open. She looks like she's just come from a treadmill or an exercise bike by way of one of those fashion magazines--navy leotard and tights and a gray sweater tied around her neck like a scarf, all of it setting off pale skin, pale blonde hair. The shoes are perfectly white, as if she's never worn them on anything but carpet. I want to toss her up against the nearest wall, press the muzzle of my gun into her neck and make her tell me what she knows, but I can't be sure she doesn't have someone waiting down the hall to pick me off.

She stands back. I clear my throat and take a step inside the apartment.

"If you found me, then you already know who I am," she says, looking up at me and holding her ground. After a second she turns and walks away into the living room. I stay where I am. When she notices I'm not following, she turns back. "There's no one else here."

"I'm supposed to believe that?"

"It's true." There's this way her mouth comes open before she speaks, so that every sentence starts with an 'ah' before the words come out. "Have a seat, Mr. Krycek. Wherever you feel most comfortable. Though I believe I'm the one in danger here. I doubt you came unarmed."

I search for bitterness or gloating, but her eyes don't give away a thing. "I came for information--"

"About anyone I know who might benefit from knowing you're still alive." A pause. "I understand your concern. Please, sit down."

She gestures toward chairs and couches like we're picking seats around a corporate conference table. I hate being led, and my gut's screaming at me to do something to switch the odds here, but I need the answers I came for. I take the few steps to the living room, glance around at my options and settle in a loveseat that gives me a clear view of all three entrances to the room.

"Spit it out." No sense letting her relax. "Whatever you've got to say."

"I work for the Special Rep--"

"I know who you work for."

She takes a breath and smoothes thin fingers over one leg of her tights. She's probably wishing she were wearing something that left her a little less exposed, but she has to know I'm not going to let her leave the room.

Or maybe she thinks the distraction will work to her advantage.

"Mr. Krycek, I know the man you're most interested in avoiding. I can assure you I'm not disposed to offer him any information."

Consortium woman. Figures.

"Why?"

"It's personal." She looks at me and past me at the same time. "Let's just say I hold no love for the man."

I almost smirk. The old man doesn't have any luck at all when it comes to getting people to feel sentimental about him. Wonder why.

I lean forward. "What about the others? Do they know about me?"

"I don't think so. As far as I know, they believe you died in a car bombing several years ago."

A bitter smile pulls at the corners of my mouth. I clear my throat. "What's your deal with Mulder?"

"He came to me. I don't know where he got my name. He asked me for help in tracing the diplomatic pouch to its source."

"And you had that kind of information?"

"I know where to get it. I have access. Diplomats and the things they carry leave trails of documentation."

"So you helped him. Why?"

Her jaw sets and almost wavers. She wants to get up off that chair. She wants to leave the room and get away from me--from this--but she doesn't let herself. She doesn't even look away. She's gutsy; I'll give her that.

"I recognized your name, Mr. Krycek, when Agent Mulder asked for a second set of diplomatic papers. I'd heard it before, in passing." Her mouth closes, then opens again. "You were in the organization long enough to understand the situation, what the future holds. Let's just say that in practical terms, the safety they speak of isn't likely to extend far beyond the board room. Agent Mulder--"

"Mulder, if he figured things out, would be running around trying to save every last orphan, widow and homeless guy on the planet." I shake my head, then shrug. "So that's it? Maybe you buy yourself a chance at survival?"

"Doesn't that make sense?"

Her voice isn't loud but the words penetrate. The room goes dead quiet. For maybe five seconds neither of us says a thing.

"So you've got no reason to mention me to the group. What's it going to take to make it stay that way?"

"Call off your vendetta against the Smoking Man."

My mouth falls open. "What?"

"Look, I don't know what kind of bad blood there is between the two of you, but leading Mulder to expose Spender's interests in Russia is more than just petty. It could be extremely dangerous."

"Whoa. Is this something Mulder--?"

"Agent Mulder was very upset. He said you'd tricked him into going there."

I start to open my mouth, but she goes on.

"Surely you must understand the stakes, Mr. Krycek. What chance do you think any of us will have if the colonists find out what Mulder learned?

"Which is--?"

"That research is going on there to find a vaccine."

"That's what Mulder told you? That they were doing vaccine research?"

"He said he was injected with something. And he remembers a black substance being dropped on him."

A shiver runs through me. For a second I can feel the slither of the Oil, clear as anything. Luckily she's glanced toward the coffee table and misses it.

She turns back to me. "Agent Mulder's comments aren't my only source of information about Tunguska, Mr. Krycek. I've known for a number of years that the Smoking Man has interests in that part of the world. Exposing his private project may serve your personal agenda, but the cost to the rest of the world could be incalculable."

I choke back a laugh. "You mean the cost to the half-dozen old geezers who sit in that board room. Like anyone else on this rock has a chance in hell."

"They could."

This time she does get up. She circles the coffee table, goes to the window beyond the loveseat I'm sitting on and stands there with her back to me. My eyes trace the lines of her leotard, a distraction I don't need, so I turn away and focus on the details of the room. It seems too cozy for her. White furniture and carpets with chrome or blue accents, something sleek and modern and sterile--that seems more her style. She probably grew up walking around with a book on top of her head, too. She moves that way. She glides, and when she opens her mouth, the words slip out of her like they've been sanded and polished.

"What? You've got a plan?" I say.

"I've established a tentative infrastructure," she says, turning to me now. "Key people who are trustworthy. We were waiting for a working vaccine."

"And what, you were going to steal it from the group?"

"What would you do?"

After a pause, I shrug. "They deserve it."

"The group's work was beginning to see some limited success until--"

I almost speak but stop myself, aware of how easily I could end up with my foot in my mouth. "I heard about what happened to your researcher."

"And her work." There's a long pause. "After the invasion, it will take thousands of human lives saved, at the very least, to ensure any viable chance of rebuilding--of long-term survival--even if the aliens were to simply abandon the planet. But if we have to fight them--"

Her tone's gotten too earnest and she knows it. She stops, goes back to her chair and sits down. A kind of death row feel hangs over the room.

"You know what the timetable is?" I say, nudging the carpet with the tip of my shoe. "How much time we're supposed to have left?"

"Fifteen years. If you trust what we're being told. And if nothing goes wrong."

"Can't count on that." I stare at the leg of the coffee table.

"With the Smoking Man's vaccine, we could be ready. We could have a viable chance."

Poured out just like silk. Then it hits me.

"Wait, you're suggesting I steal the old man's vaccine?"

"You know where it is." She doesn't even blink. "What would it be worth to you to have a chance at a real future, Mr. Krycek?"

I should laugh out loud, let her think I think she's nuts, but I can't pull it off. I've been seeing the end since I was eleven years old, like flying over and over into a brick wall where each time you feel the pain and the terror but you never quite make it to the part where everything goes black and disappears. Something in my throat swells.

I swallow against the pressure. "It's in a Russian prison camp, for godsake," I say, my voice too dry. "You don't know what security's like around those places."

"How long have you been living with the knowledge of how human life will end, Mr. Krycek? Do you ever wake up having dreamed about the invasion?" She tries for another one of those impassive stares, but the corner of her mouth pulls and for the first time I see something behind those eyes besides Ms. Calculating Administrator. There's a woman in there, and she's scared.

"How do I know you're not fronting for the group--that I get the vaccine and you hand it over to them?"

"What guarantee do I have that you won't take what I've just told you and expose me to those same men, Mr. Krycek?"

"What would that get me?"

"They might take you back. Your safety would be guaranteed."

"Safety? The minute the old men hand the reins to the colonists, they're dead."

"Exactly." Her eyes are hard, like gray crystal.

No words come. It's overload, the thing I've always dreamed about but never really expected to touch: a viable chance. And now it's fallen right into my lap. I glance down at the carpet and clear my throat. "I'll think about it. Anyway, from what I hear there are still a few bugs in the formula." I look up. "And I want to meet these people in your group."

"I can arrange a meeting."

"Separate meetings," I say. "One on one."

"Separate, then. You can compare what they tell you."

"Public places. You give me fifteen minutes notice and a target area, I pick the exact locations."

"Agreed."

"All in Manhattan in the next three days."

"I'll need to contact several individuals, but I believe it can be arranged. How should I contact you?"

"Post a message online at this address." I stand up and pull a card with the URL from my pocket; she meets me halfway and takes it. "We'll go from there."

My hand goes back into my pocket and I notice it's shaking, a kind of delayed reaction because my mind's thick with the numbness that comes when everything around you is suddenly flipped upside down. Covarrubias and I are standing just staring at each other now; there's nothing left to say. I nod toward the door and make a move to go. Her shoulders seem to relax.

"I meet your people, I think about it, then I make up my mind. Anyway, there's no guarantee we can get to the stuff even if I decide to try it," I say as she opens the door.

"I know what it is to take a chance, Mr. Krycek."

"I'll wait for your message," I say. Then I'm out of there and heading for the elevator, legs seeming to move without me, or in spite of me. I punch the down button and wait. I'd always figured if I ever got to this point I'd feel the way I had as a kid when I was the first one in our group to top that mountain--that there'd be some kind of rush, a feeling of power--but the truth is, I'm exhausted. At least I made it through our little meeting without her noticing the arm.

So she thinks the old man's making his own vaccine. For a second, I smile.

There's a ding and the elevator door slides open. I get in, push the first floor button, lean back and let the wall take my weight. In my mind, I see Covarrubias: her lips moving as she talks, the V of her leotard, then her standing by the window, an abstract of shoulders, hips, legs. I don't know what the rest of her agenda is--yet--and I'm not swallowing everything she said, but I think she's on the level about this plan of hers.

A chance. No pie-in-the-sky bullshit but a real chance.

Maybe it's a long shot, but it could work. We're no Albert Schweitzer and Florence Nightingale but if we pull it off, what difference does it make?

I close my eyes but no matter how hard I try, I can't picture a future. All I see is that brick wall rushing toward me the way it always has, except that now the action stops before I hit. Then it starts over: flying toward the wall, stopping just short of it. Eventually I notice my breathing, loud and ragged over the hum of the elevator car. My throat aches and my legs are barely holding me up.

_Everything you do from now on counts, you little bastard._

I straighten up, bite my lip hard and pull myself together. I've got to keep my head.

More than ever, I've got to keep a clear head now.

\--------------------------------

NARRATIVE B

_Krycek and Marita negotiate an alliance_

  
I'd figured two days in New York to find Mulder's source and another couple if I needed to take him/her out, but my plans changed. I found Covarrubias on the second day, and no profile I could've worked up would have fit the woman who answered that door.

She was syndicate, organized, smart enough to recognize my name and realize I'd eventually come looking for her. And she was prepared. She knew she'd have to make herself valuable to me to save herself, and she pulled it off in a way that topped anything I could've asked for: she had a plan to save the world, or whatever reasonable part of it she could. Because unlike the stuffed suits sitting in the group's board room, she realized that none of us could survive alone. Real survival meant numbers. For the price of Lev's vaccine--or the old man's, the way she had it figured--I could buy in. The organizational end of things was what I wasn't equipped for and that's what she had in place... or said she did.

I tried not to act too eager, and it was probably easy enough for her to read my numbness as detachment, a good thing because my mind was reeling. As far as I could tell, I made it out the door in one piece but by the time I was in the elevator going down, I was shaking. It wasn't until that moment that it hit me: I'd never really expected to have viable chance to survive. Scary, if you think about it, the things your subconscious can hide from you. Now here was that one-in-a-million shot at staying alive, but it shifted the responsibility for what would follow squarely onto me. If I didn't survive now, it was my own damn fault. 

If the race didn't survive, well, maybe that could be laid at my feet, too.

And Covarrubias'.

I wondered how well she slept at night.

20 May - 10 p.m.  
Added another four days to my room reservation. Have a mail out to Ché re Covarrubias--anything he can find on her I need to know. She's bound to know more about me that she let on tonight and I can't afford to be behind. Wonder what her gripe is with the old man. And does she know the Brit's only half-invested in the project? There's always the chance she could have some sort of agreement with him.

If she's married to this plan the way she wants me to think, then she'll do whatever it takes to pull it off, including taking the vaccine and cutting me out if it suits her. I need to make myself so valuable she won't be able to think about getting rid of me. Ditto for Lev's project. If they catch me trying to take some of the vaccine, I have to be too valuable to cut loose.

Strange kind of overload. I should be flying, high on the possibilities, but all I see are how many ways I could blow it or be left on the outside, banging on bullet-proof glass. But then I guess it's what I know best--being left behind. Whatever he intended me to learn, maybe that's the real lesson the old man taught me. Too bad for him.

Left the Farabloc Ché gave me at his place so I'll have to make it through these few days on my own. At least Covarrubias didn't notice the arm. Hopefully we'll be into this too far to turn back before she does.

21 May - 7 a.m.  
Received some initial info from Ché. Covarrubias' father was a Peruvian diplomat who came to New York in 1984. Brought the family, though his wife, some British socialite, decided to split a couple of years later. Marita did three years at a private high school, then went on to Columbia and stayed around for a Masters in international relations. Got picked up by the U.N. as soon as she graduated. Daddy died 10 months later and she took over his apartment. She doesn't seem like the sentimental type, but maybe a little nostalgia would explain the babushka flavor the place has that doesn't seem to belong to her. Her old man was only fifty-four. I'd give a lot to know what he died of.

No time for speculation now, though. The first of her people that she promised to connect me with is ready to meet, so I've got to pick a location and get back to her ASAP. I need to make sure they're on the level. Taking them one at a time, it should be easy enough to spot any inconsistencies in their stories.

I keep trying to check myself, make sure I'm not falling for something too good to be true. Guess I'll find out soon enough.

21 May - 4 p.m.  
Miguel Ansbach (doctor, long-time Covarrubias family friend and--my guess--syndicate researcher) arrived at our meeting more nervous than I was. Nothing slick about him: no offering me money/power/influence to join up, just 100% professional. Wanted to know about the vaccine's properties, side-effects, etc., and how soon they could expect to get their hands on some. Talked about the problems inherent in mass-producing the stuff, moving it, and how it's going to be important to maintain genetic diversity over the long haul by spreading the vaccine worldwide.

He let slip a little about Covarrubias' family. I think he was under the impression she'd already given me the backstory. Anyway, I just let him talk. Evidently this plan was her father's idea. He was some kind of populist, came from money but (Ansbach's words) "valued the stable boy as much as the banker." Wonder how he got mixed up with the syndicate. I bet once he decided to sidestep the official agenda, he planted Ansbach inside the research program.

Seems legit so far. Another meeting's on tap in an hour, this one in Battery Park because the woman uses a guide dog. I'm out the door again.

22 May - 8 a.m.  
Long night--bad night. I feel like a rat running on an electrified plate: no matter where I am, I should be somewhere else. Too many things to do: info to gather, contact stories to verify, plans to make... Oh, yeah, and a vaccine to secure--minor detail. No way to stop the clock from ticking.

Met with Mahta Ahsani (World Health Organization) yesterday at five. She described possible distribution routes and wanted to know what I knew about the vaccine's effect on a child's physiology, since third world kids will be the easiest to reach--just ship the stuff in with other medical/relief supplies and label it as vitamin shots. All kinds of details I'd never thought about. I'm way out of my depth here.

Came back too wound up to eat. Grabbed a bottle from the mini bar and fell asleep in front of the TV. Woke up about eleven from a crazy dream, soaked in sweat. Socket and harness were a mess. Tried to wash them the best I could but I don't know if the smell will come out. Like I need a new way to have people notice me.

Mixed-up dreams: the siege of an embassy combined with spies that melted and turned into the Oil, and I was inside with--of all people--Little Miss Upper Crust, Liliana the ambassador's daughter. For an eight-year-old the kid was one bitchy little powerhouse; I remember Vanya swapping shifts with me so he wouldn't have to watch her. In the dream we're holding them off, then all of a sudden I'm asleep and she's shaking me, saying, "Aren't you going to save me, Aleksei? Well, aren't you?" Giving me that iron glare she'd use.

Stump's a mess, rashy. Soaked it for a while, paced the room, ended up going through the Brussels exercises twice and then back to bed. Harness is still damp this morning, so I hope Covarrubias gives me some lead time before she drops her third contact on me. Anyway, I'm still half out of it.

23 May - 7 p.m.  
Still waiting to hear from Covarrubias. She's got 24 hours left and she promised me three people. I'm going to hold her to that.

Made myself a long checklist with Tolya at the top. It's been nearly five months and the man's a magnet for good intel. I'll have to check in with him ASAP. Also have to check on Mulder again before I head for Moscow. Everything's so fluid I don't know what or who I can count on. Mulder might crumble if Scully takes a turn for the worse. Strange, thinking about all the time I've put into Mulder and wondering what the chances are it'll pay off. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Other times I start thinking that I sound too much like the old man.

Andrei would be proud if he understood his vaccine's real potential. I owe him big time. Have to make it up to him someday.

24 May - 11 a.m.  
Third meeting--a pharmaceutical exec. The plan is to manufacture where bribes will buy easy camouflage. Still, it sounds like a major project, each step of this plan a minefield. Hard to believe that once I figured just having that vaccine running through my veins was going to be my salvation.

Feel like I'm on a treadmill. Cut off a guy's arm, then shove him out the door to save the race. 

Hard to keep writing these logs but they've always been good reality checks at a distance. Never pays to throw away a resource--especially hindsight. Or so I keep reminding myself as I work on these entries. Sometimes I wonder what Mulder would think if he got ahold of them--like at a funeral, me gone and somebody handing them to him as next of kin. What would he think, once he was over the shock of finding out who I am? But he'd have to get past Che's encoding first.

I must really be losing it, thinking shit like this.

24 May - 3 p.m.  
Waiting to see if Covarrubias makes the next move now that I've seen her people, or if I'm going to have to contact her. Don't want to look too eager, but I've got things to do in D.C. so I can't wait around forever.

Realized a couple of hours ago that I haven't eaten a decent meal since I've been here, though I've made a good dent in the stash in the refrigerator. Maybe that accounts for how I feel, like I'm running on empty. Got to get a grip, start taking better care of myself.

I'm getting a bruise on one side of the stump but I can't find anything in the socket it could be rubbing against.  Damn plastic arm.

24 May - 8:30 p.m.  
She just mailed me asking if I have any further questions, so I said I'd be by in ten minutes. Let's hope this plays out well.

\-----------------------------

SCENE: NO-MAN'S-LAND

_Krycek and Marita meet to talk business, but the mood turns unexpectedly._

 

"You make late calls, Mr. Krycek," she says from behind the slightly-opened door. In the dimness, I can't tell whether she's frowning or not.

"I have a schedule to keep."

The door goes nearly closed, the chain drops and the door swings fully open. She's mannequin-perfect in gray slacks and a cream-colored turtleneck. Never a hair out of place. I bet when the wind blows, it goes around her.

"Come in."

She leads me to the living room without any further small talk and settles in a tapestry-print chair. I take my place on the love seat. An overlay floats in my mind--the sway of her hips as I followed her into the room. I push it aside.

"Were your questions answered to your satisfaction?" she asks, one hand coming to rest in the other as she tries to strike a pose somewhere between in-control and negotiable.

"Your people explained themselves pretty well." I lean forward. "The doctor's known you for quite a while, but where did you get the others?"

Her eyes widen.

"Ansbach said this plan was your father's," I coax her. Guess he didn't mention that he'd talked about her family.

She clears her throat. "George Ellison was an associate of my father's." The pharmaceutical exec. "He's dependable and very discreet."

"And Ahsani? She works with you?"

"We have contact, yes. Overlapping projects."

"She know what this is about?"

"No." Her lips close and then open again. "We operate through mutual assistance. Her family wants to come here from Iran but they're not allowed to take any money out of the country, which makes it virtually impossible. I'm working on bringing them here."

"By converting their assets?"

"Yes."

"And in exchange, she'll work your additions into her aid packages."

"She's been told the vaccine is to counter a military threat--an engineered biological weapon."

"Just not engineered on this planet." I'd laugh if it were funny. Instead I shake my head and smooth my thumb along the arm of the loveseat. "So how many of these people know about colonization?"

"Only Miguel." She pauses and drills me with those crystal gray eyes. "Who else would believe it, Mr. Krycek?"

"He works for consortium research?"

She stops, her mouth half-open.

"Your father place him there?"

A muscle in her cheek twitches. "Yes. He's been part of the program since the late '80s."

I glance around. "And your father?" Not a picture of daddy anywhere. Strange, for someone who's taken over his legacy. "How did he end up in this? Was he career syndicate?"

Finally a little heat. She sits up straighter; the corners of her mouth harden. "My father didn't ask for this, Mr. Krycek; he never would have supported the Project. His participation was the result of an accident--chance. And he paid for that turn of events--"

"You think he's the only one?"

The sudden sharpness of my voice stops me. I swallow and make myself sit back against the cushions. Blindsided. Her eyes widen, then slip down to wander among the magazines on the coffee table. One hand presses against the arm of the chair.

I look away and study the pattern of the fabric beside me. Nice move, Aleksei; just let yourself go like a young pig bolting through a hole in the fence.

My mind goes back to the orphanage garden. A pig's managed to make it out of his pen and he's tearing across rows of cabbage and turnips for all he's worth. Vlad goes sprinting after him, knowing he's in for it if the pig gets away. He dives for the squealer but the pig races on--right into the path of a tractor. Instant bacon.

"How long have you known?" Her voice is softer this time, more subdued.

I pull myself back to the room.

"The old man recruited me in '85," I say, clearing my throat. I shrug as slightly as possible against the too-tight harness under my shirt. "I was working as a lab gofer on some of the early research. Didn't have a clue what it was about at the time." I laugh, but it's not very convincing. I'd envied that pig at first, running for his freedom.

Her mouth opens--that preliminary 'ah' comes out--and she closes it again. Silence swallows us. The seconds stretch out; I see the soil of the fields overlaying the carpet, hear Vlad's cries when they beat him for the loss of the pig. The pain of my clenched fist brings me back to the room. I backpedal as best I can, trying to assess how much I've let out. Covarrubias gets up from her chair.

"Would you like a drink, Mr. Krycek?"

"Don't call me that," I say, and shrug. "It's not like we just met. Anyway, it reminds me of the old men in the board room."

She lets out a smile at that, blushes, turns and leaves the room.

Full-out schoolgirl smile. She's actually alive inside that perfect shell of hers.

I get up, stretch my legs and start around the room slowly. A little oval photograph sits on a lamp table, a sepia of a young girl, probably in the early 1900s or before. Another picture sits on the mantel, this one of a couple with three children, about the same vintage as the first. Everybody's giving their best serious portrait pose. The house behind them is big--landowner's housing.

I check the bookcase. Classics: Shakespeare, Dickens, Cervantes, Tolstoy. A pricey-looking copy of Hugo's Les Miserables lies at the end of the stack as if on display. I lift the cover. There's an inscription inside, a long paragraph. Apparently it's a gift to her father from someone named Jaime but it's in Spanish and I can only make out a few of the words.

I close it and move on to a little glass case beside the love seat. On top there's a book of poems--Anna Akhmatova. I run my finger across the cover--dusty, not something she set out tonight for my benefit--and flip it open.

_How can you bear to look at the Neva?  
How can you bear to cross the bridges?_

Without thinking, I'm back in St. Petersburg, walking along the Neva's frozen canals and feeling like the last man on earth. I can almost feel the chill in my fingers, the bite of the wind against my face.

The clank of glasses pulls be back to reality. I shut the book and turn.

"You read her?" I say, picking up the volume casually.

She stops, surprised by my question. "Sometimes. She has no illusions. I like that."

I tell myself only one drink. She pours, hands me a glass and starts to tell the story of how in 1982 her father's best friend, a scientist, talked him into a trip to the Siberian forest to look for evidence of the mysterious 1908 event. Martín, her father, wasn't crazy about the idea but the two had known each other since they were kids; they were like brothers. In the Tunguska woods, Martín witnessed a period of strange behavior in his friend, characterized by black streaks that seemed to swim through his eyes, though eventually it passed. Back home again, he'd inquired about the phenomenon that had left his friend with no memory of part of the trip. Within weeks he was contacted by a mysterious chain-smoking American who warned him never to speak of what he'd seen. There were threats, and later negotiations, and Martín moved his family to New York to fill a 'diplomatic' appointment. Evidently he was a man with a talent for making valuable connections. But he hated what the group had him doing, and the fact that the old men were only out to save themselves.

"He did what he could. He risked his life to set this--" Her lips close abruptly. She swirls the last of the liquid in her glass and stares at it. She's like a sepia herself. In the next room a clock chimes ten.

"More?" she says, pulling herself together. She stands and picks up the bottle.

I shrug.

She pours us both a little more and returns to her chair. We toast the vaccine and its successful retrieval. I tell her a little about the history of the Russian vaccine--not the politics, but the research itself. She tells me how the old man stumbled his way around the group's demand to see the DAT tape I'd taken with me to Singapore.

Eventually we toast again, this time to fortune: for the luck to pull this operation together and enough time to fulfill it before the colonists come screaming down from the skies.

The talk gets less focused. She quotes a little Akhmatova. Her accent isn't the greatest but she speaks with conviction, not holding back. I say Akhmatova was right about her description of the snow in St. Petersburg. I speak the lines in Russian and they feel good rolling off my tongue; it's been too long. She asks me to recite the whole poem but I change the subject, pleading failed memory.

She's just Marita now and I'm just Alex. She learned about the Oil seven years ago, when her father found out he had less than a year to live. I say the old man had me shoveling horse shit right under the Brit's nose when I first came here. She knows what it's like, pulling up roots and then having to reinvent yourself in another culture half a world away.

Our final toast is to clear, dreamless sleep. I can't even say which one of us suggests it. When I leave, it's with a promise to contact her again within the next few weeks.

In the too-bright light next to the elevator I squint, then step to one side to check the micro-camera I planted earlier on the trunk of a fake tree. Knowledge is power. Still, it was a nice, strange interlude, like one of those Christmas truces on the battlefield at midnight, both sides coming up out of their trenches to exchange what few luxuries they have or to kick a ball around. I wonder what we looked like, two descendants of the project sitting on opposite sides of a room, the mood halfway between a wake and a mutiny, offering our little scraps of stories and information.

I watch the numbers light up overhead, the elevator slowly making its way to where I wait. Finally the doors slide open and I get in, punch 'lobby' and close my eyes against the sudden downward drop. Will I make it through the night without waking from another crazy dream, or from the gnawing of the ghost pains? I feel loose now, warm and fluid, but there's no telling what a few more hours will bring. Maybe I'll luck out and get a rerun of that smile.

The end of the poem hovers in the shadows at the edge of my mind like an informant waiting to make contact. If I'm careful, I can handle it without pulling it too far into the light. 

 _The black angels' wings are sharp,_  
Judgment Day is coming soon,  
And raspberry-colored bonfires bloom,  
Like roses, in the snow.*

 *Poem by Anna Akhmatova

\-----------------------------------------  
NARRATIVE C

_Krycek finalizes plans with Marita and returns to Russia to bolster his position there_

_  
The thing about life is that you can't be ready for every single crazy turns it takes. Plan all you want, but you'll never anticipate them all. Most of the turns my life had taken were like Hong Kong.  You know: walk into an airport john, unzip and find yourself face to face with a leggy brunette bearing gifts--just not any you'd ever want._

But this was different. Hell, I had no experience at all with the kind of upswing that was facing me now. Four days in New York and I'd gone from hunting down Mulder's source out of self-defense to being handed a plan for surviving hell on earth. Reserved seat in the lifeboat. Beyond that, this was my chance to scale that ladder the old men figured I'd been knocked off of, and I'd be damned if I was going to let it slip away.

So I laid my plans: return to D.C., take care of what I had to do there, then fly to Moscow to catch up with the latest intelligence from Tolya and move on to the camp. I had to get a sample of the vaccine and it wasn't going to be any walk in the park, because Lev guarded every drop of the stuff like a Swiss bank guard.

The morning after my meeting with Covarrubias I got up early and dragged myself to the airport. I was still a little hung over but our encounter the night before had been worth it, a strange little hour or so with some unexpected twists. Somewhere along the line Covarrubias had lowered her quills, I'd gotten some information and we'd laughed at a few jokes that were never quite spelled out in words--survivors' humor, I guess. Whatever. Maybe this alliance would work out in more ways than one.  At least, I guess that's what my subconscious was hoping, because I dreamed about Marita that night.  It wasn't what I needed. I'd learned my lesson about mixing business with pleasure years ago. Anyway, I was the last guy she'd want if she knew. I could picture the look on her face when she found out, and it was a lot more sneer than sympathy. Not that I'd want her pity. Actually, I didn't give a shit what she thought of me as long as we made this plan work.

Back in D.C. I made arrangements to meet with Tolya in Moscow and checked my audio feed in the closet next to Mulder's place. The thought of the DOD snooping on him from the apartment upstairs had me worried, but there wasn't a damn thing I was going to be able to do about it. Mulder'd just have to manage on his own until I got back. Hopefully he wouldn't do anything stupid and compromise himself. His concern for Scully should help keep him out of trouble, though. He'd want to be there, help her through.  Hell, he'd want to ride in like a warrior on a white horse and save her, hard facts or opposing armies be damned.

If she didn't make it, it was going to kill him, and what good would he be to me then?

Good old Mulder and his pit bull loyalty. Just my luck that I'd come up on the wrong side of it, like I had with the old man. When I was a little kid I used to fall asleep thinking about that, you know: what it was about me. Why was I never good enough, that I was shivering myself to sleep every night while Mulder had a room of his own, and summer camp, and Oxford? Good thing I didn't know about Diana or Jeffrey then.  It might have damaged my tender young psyche, made me cynical or something.

But none of that mattered anymore. I could make my own luck now.

* * *

**CHE'S DIARY**   
_25 May 9 p.m._   
_Krycek has returned, but in spite of the fact that his trip to New York was apparently fruitful, things have not been going well between us. He has me digging deep for additional information on this Covarrubias and her family, and I made a passing remark about his having found someone to settle down with--a clearly humorous reference, I thought, to our conversation of the last time he was here. But he told me to "stuff it" and afterwards didn't talk to me for the better part of an hour. I suppose I should have been more careful; Krycek and humor are not so easily mixed._

_Aleksei looks pale and tired, but even my meals seem a source of irritation for him. "You don't have to go out of your way for me," he says as if he's caught me in some betrayal. Certainly he is not looking out for his own health, though, and this evening when I called him over to the computer, there was vodka on his breath. I said nothing, but never have I been more aware of how dangerous Aleksei Dmitrievich Krycek can be. Even when he stayed with me after the old vulture tried to blow him up, he did not lash out at me but rather brooded and kept to himself. For years I have rationalized his danger out of necessity, though it seems imprudent now. I also realize I would not be free, if I so chose, to walk away from our long collaboration._

_26 May 7:30 p.m._   
_Quite obviously Krycek is keeping something from me, or rather he appears to be deliberating about whether he should share his weighty secret, whatever it is. Until he decides, I am trying to stay out of his way, though this is a difficult task inside one's own home; I confess to having visited Mrs. Glaser next door this afternoon in an effort to find temporary escape from the heavy atmosphere that has descended upon my little domain. When Krycek and I speak, it is of the research, and indeed we have made progress that pleases him. We have traced a physician, Miguel Ansbach, Colombian, and have found more regarding the mother of Ms. Covarrubias (British, who returned from New York to Peru to a landowner/lover after two years in New York) and Ms. Covarrubias' father (diplomat, negotiator, facilitator) who died at 54 from causes we have yet to discover, though it appears Krycek has a theory... which means the cause is likely to be deliberate rather than natural. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to live a simple existence like Mrs. Glaser's, where drama consists in the change in prices at the grocery store, where things are what they appear to be, without spies, counterspies or agents of one sort of mayhem or another always at work in the background._

_26 May 10:50 p.m._   
_In a moment of apparent vulnerability (I think he had been dealing with a bout of the ghost pain, judging from his search for the Farabloc), Krycek asked me to look at the socket of his prosthesis in case I could detect anything that would be causing a bruise he has developed. It was obviously difficult for him to hand me the device, and I must say I felt very uncomfortable touching it, as if I were exposing a part of the man that should remain private. I could find nothing; it seemed regular enough inside, with no notable protrusions, though the smell of the liner that goes inside it was far from pleasant. Afterward I went online, researching, and discovered a message board for amputees. The problem evidently is not uncommon, and may result from shrinking of the stump, which will require refitting of the device during the first year, a prospect that did not at all delight my guest. If he had had something in his hand when I told him, I think he would have thrown it and done some damage. But I also found several tips about removing the odor from his socket liner, and that--finally--brought a brief smile from Krycek and a mumbled thank-you._

_Aleksei leaves tomorrow for Russia. I have mixed feelings--mostly, I suppose, because I wish the desire that he were gone was not so strong in me. It has never been this way between us, and I can't see that it bodes well for the future._

* * *

Guess I was on overload, but at the time it didn't register. I had work to do; there was no time to be worrying about personal details. By the time I'd left Ché and his hovering, though, some of those details had already caught up with me. A bruise that had developed on one side of my stump that was getting worse with time and it made wearing the arm even more of a pain than it usually was. Beyond that, I'd been hitting the vodka too hard and eating too little. Sleep only came in fits and starts. And there were dreams.

On the flight from New York to D.C. I dozed off as soon as we'd reached cruising altitude--says something about the shape I was in--and started a rerun of the dream about Liliana and the embassy siege. At least, I thought that's what I was in for. But when Liliana turned away from the window to face me, she morphed into one of the clone girls from Alberta, all big, pleading eyes and dark braids. I could almost hear her inside my head, begging me to get her out of there to some place safe. But then that's what everybody on the planet is screaming--or would be, if they knew what's coming. I managed to wake myself up, but the picture in my head stuck; I could almost feel that cold Alberta wind on the back of my neck. For a second my mind made one of those crazy connections--the clone girl and the assignment the old man had given me outside Sacramento six years earlier, but it didn't make any sense. They'd have dozens--maybe even hundreds--of guinea pigs. Why clone one somebody might be looking for?

I didn't give the dream another thought.

There was no ignoring the problem with the stump, though. It would just get worse and then I'd be up Shit Creek, along with everybody else on this dustball. You watch enough movies or TV, you get the idea that help should be rushing in from every quarter if you're trying to save the world. But there it is: the big gap between fiction and reality.

I spent four days in Brussels: assessments, tests and way too much time to look at myself in a mirror.  Came away with an extra sock inside my socket liner and a caution that it was only a temporary fix, that the stump would continue to shrink and eventually I'd have to come back for re-tooling. Like a damn machine: it hit me hardest when I saw the big talk of the hospital, the latest hand from Otto Bock, the Mercedes Benz of prosthetics. Without the cover, it looked like something that belonged on a robot. I felt a little like that, having to stop in for tune-ups, wasting time I should be spending fighting what was coming. I'd planned on firming up strategy while I waited, but the truth is I was spending a lot of that time flat on my back, staring at the fleur-de-lis on the wallpaper or the clouds drifting past the window of my room, digging myself into a nice mental hole. I kept flashing on Mulder running toward me in the camp, that 'I'm going to kill you now' fire in his eye and the way he almost got to me with the knife... before he hauled us out of there in a truck with no brakes.  _How far did you think you'd get, Mulder, before you ran out of gas and ended up lost? You think people wouldn't have reported you, that you wouldn't have landed in more trouble than you were in to begin with?_ Anyway, I would've gotten him out if he'd just sat tight, but then patience has never been Mulder's strong suit.  _Don't think, just charge right out there, Mulder. Make yourself feel righteous. It's what you want most anyway, isn't it, you pathetic fuck?_  And look who paid the price.

I was slipping.  I knew it but I was just watching myself go down. 

Enter the cavalry.

Make that the wheelchair cavalry: the old guy from before, Delmas. He inched his chair into my room, made his way past my pretty obvious efforts to ignore him and started giving me the 'light at the end of the tunnel' spiel. If it had been anyone else I would've given them a 9mm welcome. But maybe the old guy had a way with words. Whatever. Fact is, it wasn't pie in the sky with him.  He was living without two limbs and he hadn't been broken by it, hadn't thrown in the towel. He kept talking to me in that quiet, matter-of-fact way of his and gradually my mind shifted away from Mulder and myself. We talked about World War II--victories and tactical blunders and the value of the underground. He had me eat at his table and told me about the different flowers in the vase and how a housekeeper had brought them from his garden. Maybe, he said, reaching for a piece of bread, it would help if I could be with a woman.

Somehow I managed to laugh.

I would rather have faced a firing squad than have some woman see me the way I was now. I changed the subject smoothly enough and we made it through the end of the meal. But I guess the idea stuck in my head because later, while I was drifting off to sleep, I felt someone beside me. For a while I actually wondered if maybe the old guy had sent in this girl he'd been hinting about, but I wasn't tensing up, just getting looser and looser, falling into what she was doing to me, so I knew it had to be all in my head. Thing was, when she'd finished with me she didn't disappear. She just lay there holding me and there was this strange peace, like somebody'd reached down and yanked me clear of the rat race.  For a little while, anyway. Couldn't bring myself to move and break the bubble for the longest time.

The next morning I was on a plane for Moscow. To help me keep a low profile, Tolya arranged for his cousin to pick me up and deposit me at the family dacha outside the city. I worked on a list of questions while I waited, though more than once I found myself out on the porch, taking in the sights and smells. Dacha season was just starting and the place was a riot of green growth and little blossoms, with trees leafing out and fruit starting to set. Overhead, the sky was wearing its best Moscow blue, and big white clouds would come drifting by. Amazing. Sometimes it could be a beautiful place--beautiful planet. If you had the time to stop and watch it. And if disaster wasn't about to come raining down on us. The hospital dream came to me again--just the last part, and only for a few seconds. As soon as I focused on it, the feeling slipped away.

By the time Tolya made it in, the sun was heavy yellow flecks glinting through the western trees. We sat on the porch drinking beers and eating the meat I'd barbecued. The new Russia had done a number on Tolya's whole presentation: he looked more like a businessman than a student these days with his tailored leather jacket and nice slacks. You've got to love it: good old western-style capitalism is the only virus around that people line up to get. Anyway, he was keeping up with the times and that was a good sign. He didn't seem to notice the arm until later, when we were inside and I found myself with a burning match in my good hand and no viable way of lifting the glass chimney on the lantern I needed to light. After an awkward second Tolya picked it up. He reddened a little.

"Truly, you have my condolences, Lyosha," he said quietly. "Petrovich told me. I believe he learned it from Peskow."

"Figures." I shrugged and jabbed the match out in an ashtray. I was going to have to go through this routine with everybody--not that I had that many contacts. Eventually Covarrubias was going to notice. "So what have you got for me?"

"Murder, intrigue." He waved a hand. "The various empires of organized crime."

I half-listened while he made his way through the highlights of his latest intel: mafia squabbles; Yemenis--new faces--looking to buy information and maybe more; the amount of nuclear material that had disappeared from the Institute in Obninsk over the years. Something about a hundred grams of recovered uranium discovered packed in four tons of beryllium.

"What do you know about Lev Dmitriyevich Semenov?" I said. I needed something I could use against Lev to keep him in line if things took a downturn at the camp.

Tolya stopped mid-sentence. "You mean, information you would find in a directory? Or something more... personal?"

I got up and went to close the door. "You know what I want." Outside, the trees were black silhouettes against a sky on fire. I dropped the latch into its slot and returned to the table where Tolya seemed lost, staring into the flame. The shadows on his face made him look pained.

"There is a woman, Irina, daughter of General Karpov," he said when he finally looked up. "A girl--she was just a girl, a headstrong runaway, when Lev Dmitriyevich met her. He had no idea who she was. I have heard there is a child in an orphanage, by now nine years old. It was a very hushed-up matter, very... unusual."

* * *

**DIARY OF LUDMILA ORLENEVA**   
_7 June 1997_   
_I have been offered money by the man who comes occasionally to see Irina S. He says an old friend of Irina's wishes to talk to her, that he will not harm her and all I must do is take her to the Losiny Ostrov park to walk the paths; this is where we will meet him. But if he is indeed her friend, why has he not visited Irina before? If anyone desires to talk to her, more likely it will be for who she is and what she may remember. The money he offers will be enough to pay off Yuri's debt so Nikolai's young thugs will finally leave us alone in peace, but Irina is not always lucid, and if she remembers the wrong thing, there will be no managing her for many weeks afterward--perhaps longer. A dilemma._

_And what of the location? I am trying to reason this out, whether I am not just a starving mouse being offered a fat tidbit of nice walnut. Any park would make a convenient meeting place, but they choose the huge forest so far from everything._

* * *

Losiny Ostrov was one of Ivan the Terrible's old hunting grounds--46 square miles of woods at the northeast edge of Moscow, a secluded place with walking trails through the birch forest. While I waited, I wondered what the hell Lev had done to this woman Irina that had landed her in a mental institution, but probably better not to even start thinking about it; Lev could be a sadistic bastard and I liked to keep my mind clear of him when I could. Tolya had warned me to keep it simple, to ease myself in, get what I needed and get out, but it was going to take more than just proof of paternity to build the kind of case I needed against Lev; after all, fathering an illegitimate kid was no big scandal.  This particularly sordid little story had a lot more to it.  Getting the information I wanted was going to involve some role-playing with a crazy woman that I wasn't particularly looking forward to, but if Irina believed I was a certain man from her past--or her imagination--then maybe with a little work she'd open up. If I played her right, maybe the bits and pieces of her memory would fall into place like tumblers in a lock and I'd learn something that would prove far more useful than just the few strands of hair we'd need for the DNA test.

* * *

**DIARY OF LUDMILA ORLENEVA**   
_9 June 1997_   
_Such a strange meeting. I took Irina to the location as planned, but once there I wondered what would happen if this turned out to be some sort of mafia encounter. I resolved that if things became threatening, I would run. It would be believable enough to say Irina had become suddenly disturbed and bolted, and that I was not able to catch up with her. That much would be the truth._

_But there was no need._

_The man who arrived was as described, dark hair and green eyes, handsome actually. Irina clung to me, but his voice toward her was so calming at first that for a while I actually believed he must have known her in her life before. But then he said his name was Anton, and I knew he was up to something. The name seemed to make no impression on her in that moment, but eventually they went walking, her hand on his arm. Aha, I thought, but they were merely strolling along, looking up at the trees, pointing and talking. When they disappeared where the path turned, I went closer. They had stopped by a high fallen log and the man helped Irina onto it to sit. She seemed to enjoy the height, and flapped her arms like a bird. Then he took her hand, and they talked, too quietly for me to hear. I was waiting for him to make some move that would set her off like a screeching peacock, but he did nothing crude or forward, but only was careful. Eventually she reached into her shirt and drew out her precious, ragged scrap of paper and showed it to him. I could see her eyes questioning, saying 'Are you really him?'_

_But upon examining the paper, the man's face grew red, he turned toward me with a look as though his eyes would pop from anger and I thought surely, surely we are both done for, Irina and me. But no, after a moment he composed himself, coaxed her down from the log, calm as before--in all this Irina had noticed nothing--and brought her back to me. When Irina looked down to busy herself with folding her little paper, he pulled me aside--roughly--I am not a young bauble like Irina, though at least I am sane while she is not--and demanded to know who else comes to see her, and how often. I told him only the one man. His mouth was hard, his eyes especially so. I was shaking--his grip was hard, pinching my arm--but I spoke up and demanded the money he owed, and he dug in his pocket, then shoved it into my hand. When he turned to walk away, Irina's head came up. He looked away, down the path, took a step and then turned back. He said nothing, but he looked at her as a man who has lost a boat and later glimpses it floating downstream with the current._

_On the way back, Irina rocked in her seat, humming, and stared out the window. I thought surely she would burst into tears, or a fit of screaming. But she was silent, running a finger lightly over her hand as the man had done._

_In truth, I believed he would try to harm me instead of giving me the money. But I got it in the end.  This nasty business with Nikolai is finally taken care of and Yuri and I will sleep soundly now._

* * *

Tolya woke up pretty fast when I slammed his face into the bed post.

"What the hell did you think you were pulling out there?"

"Lyosha, what--?" He tried to struggle but I had a good, tight grip on the neck of his shirt.

"Anton, remember?" I leaned in closer. "You shouldn't leave notes around in your own handwriting. Somebody might recognize it." I gave him another shove into the post, then let go of him and tried to catch my breath. I leaned in again--it makes them squirm like anything when you get really close--and gave him my best gritty voice. "Don't ever try anything like that again."

"It was good cover, Aleksei." He licked at the blood running down his lip and winced. "You got what you went for, did you not?"

I reached for a paper in my pocket and pulled out two long strands of hair, the material I needed for the DNA tests. "You could have gotten this yourself. Why send me to see her?"

I had to rough him up a little more, but I finally pulled the story out of him. He was the one who'd set Irina up with Lev in the first place. She'd been a runaway teenager living with friends on the Arbat, desperate for money, and Tolya figured he could use her to work some saleable information out of Lev. Of course, he didn't know Lev, or what he'd end up doing to the girl. Once Irina was a basket case, he'd grown a conscience.

"So you made up Anton who was going to come for her someday?"

Tolya nodded and looked down.

"And what was this about? Putting a little sunshine in her day by sending Anton to see her? That why you told me not to ask her any questions?"

All I got was a shoulder shrug. Tolya was staring a hole in the floor. I should've given him a good kick, but I didn't. "What happens when he never comes back?"

He looked up at that, but before he could say anything I'd backhanded him, knocking him flat on the mattress. Behind my eyes I saw Irina again, that almost-smile, that little tremble in her jaw, and beyond that something I didn't need, the cloudy image of a body lying on a country roadside, the girl's skirt flapping in the icy morning breeze. I swallowed, pulled out my gun, pointed it at him and nicked off the safety. I didn't say a word. I just watched Tolya shake.

* * *

Eventually things settled down and Tolya offered me an olive branch: information he'd been tracking about a rise in abductions in Kazakhstan. It could've been boom or bust; the reports were coming from the cosmodrome at Baikonur, and UFO sighting claims around launch facilities are always high. But Tolya's sources at RIAP--the Research Institute on Anomalous Phenomena in the Ukraine--had a hunch, and beside that he'd had a call from a 'woman in Paris who dealt with abductees'. Luckily Tolya hadn't gotten back to her and I made sure he wouldn't.  The last thing I needed was to have Diana feeding tips to the old men in the board room.  That is, if this turned out to be anything at all. But the trip to find out would only mean a few days' detour. I could use the time to come up with a plan for getting my hands on enough vaccine to take to Covarrubias, and beyond that, what kind of control I'd negotiate in exchange for supplying it. There were a couple of researchers at RIAP who wanted to interview the Baikonur witnesses, but they'd been told it would have to be on their own time because the evidence didn't look clear-cut enough to carry the official seal ,and RIAP is no MUFON; they answer to the Russian Academy of Sciences. For a donation toward their travel expenses, Tolya managed to get me signed on to their little expedition.

The day I left Moscow, the DNA results came in: Irina and the boy--I'd made Tolya get a sample from the kid--were a match. The kid's results also matched a print-out of Lev's that Tolya had wheedled from some starving file clerk at FSO headquarters, but he knew I'd be picking up a sample of my own to verify as soon as I got to the camp.

The RIAP researchers and I spent three days in Baikonur, a dust pit if there ever was one. Between the wind and the sand, I had to keep my laptop in a closet to keep grit from blowing into it. The sand managed to make its way into my socket liner, though. Together, the grit and the heat took its toll on my already sore stump, and the mentions we heard of triangle-shaped craft shook me in a way I thought I'd grown out of. On top of it all, my subconscious kept replaying that damn scene in the park, Irina with that look on her face that I couldn't quite get out of my head. Lena, my first encounter as a kid, had been a little touched herself and she'd had that same kind of half-smile, as if she were reaching for something that might only exist in her mind. Poor little  _zvezda_.

On the face of it, our interviews were more puzzling than conclusive. Fourteen people had gone missing over a two-month period, nine of them on a single night the month before. Eight were women in their late teens and twenties; the rest were kids. None had been seen since, a fact that puzzled the guys from RIAP because they were used to talking to people who believed they'd been taken and then returned, but here all we had were sobbing relatives and the testimony of a handful of people who claimed they'd seen mysterious craft. There was no telling how many of them were telling the truth and how many, like Mulder, just wanted to believe.

As it turned out, abduction wasn't the only plausible explanation for the disappearances. Baikonur was the last outpost at the end of the world for a lot of women who'd gone there with their army husbands. They could have just gone AWOL and headed back to Russia. But their friends and relatives didn't think so. And it didn't explain the missing kids. The territory outside Baikonur city was pretty unforgiving.  If they'd just wandered away and gotten lost, or been attacked by predators, there would have been some kind of trace evidence, but they'd found nothing.

The thing I kept turning over in my mind on the way to Kraznoyarsk was the one local who'd approached me. He had that look--the eyes that said he'd seen more than he could ever put to words. He was a worker at the complex and said he didn't want to be embarrassed in front of his bosses by having it known he'd talked to the UFO people; that was for women. But he told me his story about being taken by a ship, and described the same kind of craft the other witnesses had. He claimed to have seen some of the missing women in the craft, and then he didn't remember anything more; he lost consciousness and woke up about three kilometers from the launch complex. Only a couple of hours had passed. I guess it could have been a lie, but he was shaking enough at the retelling to seem pretty convincing. I didn't bother to pass along his story to the men from RIAP. It was possible that the old men tapped into RIAP's work occasionally--after all, their papers were available online--and if what this Kazakh had told me turned out to be significant, I wasn't going to give the group a leg up by offering the information up on a platter. But the significance of what he'd said stuck with me: he was the only adult male taken (or at least the only one to admit it); he was returned; and he was the only local involved while all the missing were Russians. I checked the back of his neck, looking for evidence of an implant, but there was nothing.

Maybe the old men knew about more of the alien agenda than they'd ever mentioned when I was around. Somehow I doubted that's what I was seeing evidence of here, though. The Brit didn't exactly trust me but he needed a sounding board for his fears and frustrations, and though we'd talked a lot, he'd never given any indication that there was more to the alien plan than what I already knew.

The other possibility was that the old men were being screwed over. Maybe there was more to the colonists' agenda than just having a hybrid developed so they could take over the planet in comfort. If that was true, it could change everything.

End Part 6

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Krycek's collaboration with Marita Covarrubias from late Season 4 to *Patient X in Season 5

NARRATIVE A

_Through the events of *Zero Sum_

  


  
The nine months between the time I met Marita and the day I pulled into New York aboard the freighter, more than ready to collect my due, were some of the most hectic I'd ever spent.  It was like being chased, except that the dogged pursuer wasn't a man this time but the clock ticking down.  How much vaccine could we make and distribute before it was too late?  How many people could be inoculated before somebody questioned the substance inside our little vials, or before we left some inadvertent clue that would expose us?  Or before the old men found us out, or the aliens got impatient and decided fifteen years was too long to wait, they were going to take over the planet now.  Or until some other factor came into play that Marita and I would never see coming until it was too late. 

Between the vaccine, taking care of some trouble I'd had with the arm and investigating more mysterious abductions like the ones at Baikonur, I almost didn't have time to think about how badly my little Siberian vacation with Mulder had veered off into the ditch.  Which was just as well; I had no desire to think about that.  Or about him, for that matter. The idea of us working together had grown out of a young kid's fantasy, and I should have known better than to keep holding onto it the way I had.  Lesson learned. 

Besides, I needed 100 percent of my focus now.  Mulder'd already stolen my arm; I wasn't going to let him take anything more away from me.  Especially when a misstep now could mean losing the most critical thing of all, our chance for long-term survival.

It seemed I was spending half my life in the air, flying from New York to Moscow to Pavlodar in Kazakhstan where a second set of abductions like the ones I'd seen at Baikonur had taken place; then Moscow to New York, New York to Cali... Well, you get the picture.  For a while there I felt like I should just buy a plane and move in.  The jet lag after each trip didn't help, either--wasted days when nothing of real consequence was getting accomplished while a steady drumbeat of tension continued in the back of my head.  Then I'd have to remind myself not to lighten up, that giving myself an ulcer wasn't going to help anything.  That unlike being the prey in some chase I might have ended up in before, keeping going now could pay off big in the end. We were running  _to_  something rather than  _away_ : salvation, or at the very least the best damn chance I'd seen of fighting the alien threat.  And if in the process things fell together just right, there'd be a little payback in the mix for the old men in the board room.  Not only had they dumped me like yesterday's garbage, but if they'd had any balls, they'd have done years ago what Marita and I were having to bust our butts to do now, make the decision to fight back rather than caving in to an alien race that wanted to wipe us out.

I wasn't spending too long in any one place during that time, and that included New York.  Which made it awkward for me and Marita to get into sync those first few months.  A couple of hours spent going over basics, maybe another forty-five minutes the day after, then the next get-together six or seven weeks later, trying to pick up where we'd left off when things had changed in the interim, I was fighting jet-lag and she was bone-weary from working what amounted to three different jobs... not the easiest set-up for having to deal with someone you barely know.

We went to Cali together that first time--to deliver our vaccine sample, have it tested and get the production started.  We hardly knew each other at that point, though finding out that our sample was viable helped loosen up both of us a little.  But I was used to being my own boss, making my own decisions, and this plan for the vaccine was her game. We were using her board, her playing pieces and playing by her rules.  It wasn't the kind of situation I ever would have picked, given a choice--this partnership, collaboration, whatever you want to call it.

And really, she didn't know me, either.  Initially she figured me for a peasant, just another of the old man's hired guns, and I had her pegged for some debutante ice queen, a rich girl looking down her perfect nose at the rest of us, who didn't get how messy the real world was.  Maybe it just bugged me how put together she always was. There was never a hair out of place or an arrangement she hadn't made in advance.  

But first impressions can be deceiving.  The more I learned about her plan, the more impressed I was with what she'd managed to accomplish.  Granted, her father had come up with the idea and the initial structure, but Marita had held all his far-flung contacts together for years so they'd be ready to spring into action if and when a viable vaccine came along.  Beyond that, Marita was a woman taking a walk down a man's alley.  I probably couldn't imagine the things she'd had to put up with to be taken seriously.

Her attitude toward me began to change as time went on, as she found out I was bankrolling the Russian research and keeping tabs on other things we'd need to know about, like the weird abductions I'd been seeing where the victims were never returned.  But she still didn't know about the arm, and I planned to keep it that way for as long as I could.  Because for as much as my logic told me that my knowledge and strategic capabilities hadn't been cut off by a glowing hot knife in that godforsaken forest, in the back of my head the thought still dogged me that no matter what I brought to this project, part of me was a walking lie, and at any time that lie could be exposed. 

It took three months from the time we delivered the initial vaccine sample to the lab until the first batch was ready to pick up, and in the interim I was--as usual--on the road.  There were  investigations of the abductions in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan and a meeting with the Brit where he let on that someone had been anonymously feeding him data on similar abductions in other parts of the world.  In late July Marita called me to New York right after the old men had let loose a bunch of test bees in a North Carolina schoolyard, which was as stupid as anything I'd seen them do.

As it turned out, it was the old man who had taken it upon himself to proceed with the test without bothering to keep the group informed of details or scheduling, and if it hadn't been for some intensive damage control that Marita took part in, the schoolyard incident would have exposed the group, and possibly Marita, which could easily have crippled our ability to distribute our vaccine.  I was mad as hell, and Marita was left worried and shaky, afraid of what else he might try that could impact our plans for the vaccine. 

But Marita was dogged as always. She kept working and discovered Alberta as the source of the package of test bees.  Which tickled an itch I'd been trying hard to ignore.  I'd been to the compound once, a few years earlier, on my way to Singapore with the DAT tape after the old man's little car bomb surprise.  While I was there I'd seen Jeremiah Smith heal a bleeding, badly injured drone in the ginseng fields. Hell, he'd worked his magic, whatever it was, on me when I'd walked into a swarm of bees there.  One minute I was being stung, blacking out and starting to suffocate; the next I was fine, as if I were waking up from a dream.  I didn't know what he'd done--maybe I didn't want to look too closely at the implications--so I'd resolved to just put the incident behind me.  But recently I'd been having a lot of trouble with ghost pains.  Thinking back to my experience in Alberta, it was hard to avoid the idea that Smith was the one person who could do something about them.  If he were inclined to, that is; the guy could be frustrating and inscrutable and he had this irritating habit of talking in riddles.  Who knew what he really thought or wanted, or if he'd just laugh in my face if I asked for his help?  So I'd tried not to think about it.

But with the connection Marita'd come up with to the schoolyard bees, and the fact that I'd been thinking about how Smith's mental powers could be the perfect way to keep tabs on the old man without him ever finding out--Smith could listen through a wall and know what he was up to with no traceable trail--I decided I had to at least try talking to him.  It was going to sound crazy, proposing what I had in mind, but the situation seemed critical.  What if we took no action and the old man did something to blow it for everybody? 

So I set off for Alberta.  It was August and the fields were dry and golden.  I tried to tell myself this trip had nothing to do with my arm.

\-----------------------------

SCENE: STEALING MOMENTS (Marita POV)

_Things should get easier once distribution of the vaccine is fully underway... though she's been telling herself that at every rising rung on the ladder of this journey, and the reality is that with each step the stakes only get higher, the burden more ponderous._

  


The elevator door glides open, revealing the brushed steel emptiness of the car's interior.  Marita sighs, steps inside and presses the button for the hotel's lobby.  Twelve hours of conferences and negotiations, and after all of it, this meeting with Krycek.  She takes hold of the handrail and lets her eyes fall shut, reaching for a fleeting moment of rest; like hummingbirds flitting from flower to flower, the opportunities vanish almost as quickly as they appear.  You have to steal them where you can.  In the darkness behind closed lids, her senses shift: she feels the rhythm of her breathing, the beads of moisture on her forehead, her skin flushed and warm.  Just one, she'd said when Krycek offered her the drink.  And to his credit he hadn't tried to ply her with more, a fact worth adding to the plus column of the tally she's been keeping on him in her head. 

Still, the single drink had been enough to allow that remark about Colin to slip out. 

Frowning, Marita opens her eyes. 

Or perhaps it was simple relief that had undone her: having to confer with a half-stranger at six or seven week intervals and carry on as if it were yesterday is like walking a tightrope.  But the meeting had gone well.  They'd exchanged their information and Krycek had seemed unusually attuned, in spite of his characteristic wariness, to her state of exhaustion, offering her fruit, then a bottle of water.  Eventually a drink.  

Marita sighs, taking in the navy suit her blurred reflection wears, until it melts into an abstract.  The man is a puzzle, one she has no choice but to deal with now in order to make her plan--her father's plan--succeed.  For the most part he's rough-hewn and plays his cards extremely close to his chest, though from time to time he's surprised her with some small admission or gesture of sensitivity, whether intended or not. 

At the street she hails a taxi.  One pulls to the curb almost immediately; she gets in and settles herself, smoothing back the hair that's been blown past her by the flow of traffic.  Seven-thirty and it's still close to 80 degrees outside.  At home her cool clothes are waiting: a sleeveless top, soft pants--comfortable things to curl up in while she reads her mail and gets ready to exercise.  Her feet are aching, desperate to escape their day-long imprisonment inside a pair of navy pumps.

Marita lets her eyes fall closed.

"Miss--"

Startled, she looks up to find the cab stopped in front of her building.  Hurriedly she pays, goes inside with a brief smile to the doorman and sinks into the impassive support of the wall of the elevator car.  As it rises, the images of her brother return: Colin laughing at his twelfth birthday party; sitting with his uncle for a guitar lesson; peering intently into a mirror to examine the first faint signs of facial hair.

A soft ding sounds and the car settles.  Marita swallows, straightens and walks through the open door.  It's been sixteen years since Colin died--a good handful since his birthday has arrived bearing this kind of sting.  Perhaps it's just the tension of having the first batch of vaccine nearly ready and Krycek in the mix.  Things should get easier once distribution of the vaccine is fully underway... though she's been telling herself that at every rising rung on the ladder of this journey, and the reality is that with each step the stakes only get higher, the burden more ponderous.

Unlocking her door, she slips inside and quickly locks it again, slipping the chain into place for good measure, then pauses in front of the hall mirror, giving her reflection a critical eye.

 _Look what the cat dragged in_ , the image in the glass seems to say.  After a moment her reflection's features soften.   

Sighing, Marita slips off her shoes and puts them on the rack in the closet.  There have been more mysterious abductions, according to Krycek, these latest not in Afghanistan but spread across the globe: the Australian outback, Ecuador, Finland.  Whatever it means, it can't be a good sign, though there's nothing she can do about them.  Face forward and take each step as it comes. It's the only way.

Avoiding the mirror's critical gaze, she goes into the bedroom, takes off her jacket and skirt and hangs them in the closet.  Krycek had paused when she asked him tonight what he thought of Mulder as potential ally or foe.  Any number of emotions had seemed to rush through his eyes before he replied.  At least, she assumes they were emotions; she isn't sure yet exactly what his depth of inventory might be in that department, but she'd noted the knitted brow, the deliberate tightening of the mouth to keep from giving anything away.  And the fact that he'd cleared his throat before he finally began to speak; she's begun to catalog his body language.  For a man Mulder obviously holds in anything but high regard, Krycek was surprisingly forgiving in his assessment of Mulder: that he's an idealist's idealist, far too easily led--or misled--and therefore potentially dangerous, but for all that, staunchly dedicated.  

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Marita works her pantyhose carefully off one leg and then the other and sets them aside.  Then she pads out to the kitchen, opens the fridge, picks out a handful of the carrot sticks she prepared the night before and pours a glass of ice water from the refrigerator door.  The glass halts halfway to her mouth.

Maybe there was more calculation in Krycek's surprising good manners tonight than she's realized.  But it had all been very businesslike. He hadn't done anything that could realistically be interpreted as a come-on.

Though he could.  After all, he's human.  And male.

Very male, a voice in the back of her head echoes.  And the last thing she needs is the complication of some sort of personal entanglement with a man like Krycek, who has all the charm and predictability of an uncaged leopard.

She brings the glass to her lips, takes a long drink of her water, then pauses and takes another.  Setting the glass down, she returns to the mirror and looks into it, studying the pale image on the other side of the glass: limp hair, lipstick worn away, dull eyes.  What  _does_  Krycek see when he looks at her?  Aside from the predictable male reaction, of course. 

She draws herself up straighter, the way she used to stand next to Colin and his friends at riding exhibitions, trying to show herself worthy of competing alongside the boys.  For a moment she pictures herself at thirteen: long hair neatly plaited down her back in a braid, bony shoulders, long legs.  Mind bursting with plans for the future. 

The expression on her reflection falters.  Marita turns away.

In the bathroom she stares at her workout clothes on the shelf, pauses and after a moment moves to the bathtub and turns on the water.  There's a skylight in the ceiling; she reaches up with the little wand and opens it as far as it will go, then starts to undress.  

Three weeks, she tells herself, and begins, unthinking, to tick off the mental list of preparations she's reviewed a dozen times before: contacts in place at the five distribution sites; dates and times scheduled; the campaign set up and appropriate flyers distributed.  Flu shots are an extremely convenient cover story this time of year. 

She stops to pour a peach-scented gel into the tub, watches bubbles start to form and rise, and steps carefully into the welcoming liquid.

Total weight of the vaccine shipment; flight arrangements--she lowers herself into the rising bubbles--cover story for the Elders to explain her weekend away; pilot's compensation, in cash; cover story for the flight crew, since she'll return with Krycek aboard...

She eases herself back and lets her neck relax into the corner of the tub. 

Krycek. 

She tries to lead herself through the maze of possible reasons for the vehemence of his attitude toward Spender, but her thoughts, like errant sparrows, return to settle on her brother.  It was a different world when Colin was alive, its reality thin and tattered now, as if the memories it holds were never more than the most fragile of fantasies.  What kind of man would Colin have grown to be, and what would he think of the woman she is now?  Better, in the end, that he never knew about the circumstances that had drawn their father into the Consortium's web, that had eventually bled the life out of him. 

Marita blinks against the stinging in her eyes.  At least Krycek isn't here to watch her. 

She looks up, at the slice of bright moon shimmering through the open skylight.  Three weeks, she reminds herself. Three weeks until the distribution of the secret vaccine begins, until they begin their end run around the old men's collaboration with the Colonists.  Three weeks until the beginning of a chance--an actual, viable chance--for survival, and the validation of her father's dream.

Three weeks, she repeats, until gradually the phrase becomes her heartbeat.  Her brother's face begins to fade.  Resigned, she sends it on its way.  The future demands her focus.  Later, when the work is done, there will be time to count her losses.

\---------------------------

SCENE: TOUCHED

_On the outside chance that he may be able--or willing--to help him, Krycek goes looking for Jeremiah Smith._

 

The chopper skims the Alberta hills, heading toward the coordinates Marita's given me, and I squint against the low sun directly ahead.  For security purposes, the ginseng operation was moved shortly after Mulder's visit.  It's mid-afternoon; I got a later start than I'd planned on, and I'm crossing my fingers that Marita's information is good because I don't have a lot of time to waste.

"There."  The pilot points and sure enough, there's the familiar pattern laid out on the ground ahead: acres of tarp-covered rows, a couple of long, pre-fab buildings for equipment and personnel, a half dozen vehicles: trucks, a couple of vans, a forklift and a backhoe.  No nostalgic country-lane feel to this installation.

I feel the drop in altitude slip through me as the chopper lowers and settles into a patch of dry, late summer grasses.  "I'll call you," I shout to the pilot as I crawl out, though I went over my instructions with him before we took off.  I crouch down, make my way past the rotor wash and stand watching until the bird and the noise it generates have disappeared over the nearest hill.

Quiet settles around me.  I turn and start to pick out the clone kids, all of them looking exactly the same as they did two years before, every one busy at their tasks, as if a stranger hadn't just appeared in the middle of their surreal little world.

After stopping to stash my traveling bag inside the nearest outbuilding, I venture out to take a look around, hopeful but nervous; I don't have a lot of practice at walking up to someone, asking for favors and hoping for goodwill in return.  Asking from behind the barrel of a gun is a different matter, but I have a feeling no gun is going to do much damage to Jeremiah Smith.  It sure as hell isn't going to make him want to help me.

Which turns out not to be a problem since I make it through the whole damn complex without coming across anyone but drones.  Not a single adult, and no sign of Smith.  Guess he's not the kindly old caretaker he made himself out to be the last time we crossed paths.  Should have figured, though: how many people are who they say they are?  And this particular guy's not even human.

Speaking of non-human, the drones are enough to give you the creeps.  They just go on their way, doing whatever's been programmed into them to do.  They walk around you in hallways but don't seem to see you, their faces expressionless--not the studied kind of blank look you get from people who are fighting to keep the world at bay, but a weird emptiness that tells you there was never anything there in the first place.

I go back over the entire compound methodically: the fields, the barn, the dorm with its sleeping rooms, laundry, kitchen, dining hall, offices and one small lab.  No Smith.  And the receipts for fertilizer and other supplies I find in the office are weeks old.  Probably faked, too, set out for looks in case anybody stumbles across this place.  When I finish, I switch tactics, searching for trap doors, then attic access, but I don't find anything up there, just dust and mats of insulation.  I stop to plant a fist in a piece of framing before I climb back downstairs; until now I hadn't realized just how much I was counting on making this connection.

There doesn't seem to be any obvious point in hanging around, but something in me isn't ready to let the possibility go, so I decide to spend the night in the hopes Smith--or at least someone who may be able to tell me how to contact him--might show up in the morning.  At this point it's nearly 7:30 and my stomach's growling, hungry for something to fill it.  I purposely kept myself out of the dining hall when the drones were at dinner; even though I've shared a meal with them before and there shouldn't be any problem, there's this vision in the back of my head of the whole group of them suddenly surrounding me, like something out of a zombie movie.  Or maybe like a group of one-armed men in a Siberian forest.  Weird paranoia or not, I plan on playing it safe. 

Eventually my stomach gets the better of me.  I slip into the kitchen and pick at the leftovers, the three drones--two boys and a girl--who are cleaning up completely ignoring me.  When I've had my fill I take another walk around the complex, scare up a cot in a storeroom, which I set up in the office, and give my pilot a call to let him know that, barring any unforeseens, I won't be needing him until the morning. 

Eventually I head outside and sit against the wall of the building in the last of the late summer sun, taking in the fresh, sweet air and watching the sun gradually touch the southern hills and start to slip behind them.  Takes a while before I realize I'm not alone.  Down at the far end of the building, one of the clone girls sits like I do, her back against the dorm's wall, watching the sun go down, her pale skin tinted an orange-gold by the light of the sinking fireball.  Every once in a while I catch her staring in my direction.  Once she sees me looking, though, she slips back into that blank look and then turns away. 

I think of the clone girl who bunked above me the first time I visited, the way she tossed and moaned in her sleep... and the way she's stuck in my head all this time, as if there's some reason I should keep remembering her.  I glance toward the end of the building; this time she's sitting forward, as if the last light of the sun is like a magnet drawing her toward it.  I wonder what--if anything--is in her head.  It's enough to give you the willies, thinking about an existence like that.  Talk about being a prisoner for life.

Once the sun goes down and the prairie chill takes over, I head inside and settle myself on the cot, hoping for a night of clear sleep with no unwelcome interruptions, though I leave the arm on; no point in being caught at a disadvantage if something unexpected happens.  I only make it a couple of hours before my luck breaks and I wake up with the worst phantom pain I've had since I lost the arm.     

So pretty soon I'm pacing back and forth, cramped with pain in a part of me that's probably only pieces of bone scattered in the Tunguska forest somewhere, gasping, wondering how long this bout is going to last and where I put the damned sheet of Farabloc Che gave me to control the pain.

Then there's a noise in the hallway outside and a face slips past the little window in the office door.  Dark face, short black hair.  Shorter guy than me. 

Adrenaline nails me and I scramble to snatch my gun from beside the sweatshirt I'm using as a pillow.  I remind myself to keep it together; this would be a stupid place to make a mistake and end up dead, larger picture considered.

A few seconds' wait and the door comes open, light spilling into the room's darkness and...

It's Smith.  My trigger finger, ever the skeptic, tenses anyway.

"Mr. Krycek?"  That calming voice.  "We're safe here, Mr. Krycek."  Just the way I remember it.

"Who was that in the hallway just now?"  A new jolt of pain shoots through my missing hand, as if some invisible torturer has just cranked the screws a little tighter.  I clamp my jaw tight.  Sweat wanders down my right temple and I can feel myself shaking.

"He's a botanist; he's doing research on the ginseng.  We just returned from Lethbridge with supplies."

"And some time at the local watering hole?"  Smith doesn't strike me as the drinking type, but it's too damn late for just a trip to the local warehouse store.

Lethbridge--it hits me now--was where that Mounty was taking me when I left him tied to a tree just off the roadside two years ago, after a little detour gone bad on my way to Vancouver and the Far East.

"Actually, we had a flat tire.  It took a while to change it in the dark.  We were already on a dirt road."  He pauses, and his tone softens.  He's right in front of me now, hand out, and after a pause I click the safety on and stuff the gun in my belt.  Now what I notice is that I'm sweating like a pig, and the pain's like a scream begging to burst out of me.

"... the towels are right inside the door, Mr. Krycek."  A pause.  "Go ahead.  We can talk afterward."

Everything around me is static, like I've been tossed into the fuzz on a TV screen.  No, it's peaked somehow... it's starting to fade.  The room filters in: desk, file cabinet, Smith.  Everything in clean outline by the light of a small desk lamp.  Smith takes his hand off the stump.  I shiver as the sweat that covers me starts to cool.   Shower.  Seems like a good idea.

I cross the hall and go through the swinging doors marked 'boys'.  Track lighting points down at the showers, leaving the rest of the room in subtle, almost peaceful shadow.  I grab a towel, turn on the water, peel off my shirt.  Damned harness is soaked.  Take off the arm and set it aside, strip down.  I'm bushed suddenly; all I want is to get these sweaty clothes off and get clean.  For the first minute or two I sag against the shower wall, but eventually I realize I'm studying the grout, then the honey color of the wood framing overhead.  The sharp sweetness of late summer grasses drifts in through an open window high up. 

Which is when it hits me: the pain's gone.  It's been gone since Smith came into the office; he was...  He touched my arm--held it for a few seconds.  Not hard, the way a cop would grab you, but a light touch, like someone guiding you toward the right bus or train.  Hadn't noticed at the time, and I only see it now like the faded rerun of a dream.  Sometimes the pain fades faster than other times, but this, it's almost unbelievable.  It's--

Focus, Aleksei. You're here to get Smith's help in tracking the old man, to--hopefully--ensure that the old fucker doesn't trade the human race for a single-seat alien lifeboat; he'd try it if he gets to a point where there's no other way to save his sorry ass. And to find out what Smith knows about these Kazakhstan abductions that don't fit the pattern.  There's a red flag there and it's flying high and bright.

I finish scrubbing, turn off the water, pick up a towel.  Find myself staring at the stump, my fingers shaky as they run along the edges of it, barely making contact.  It feels completely neutral--just arm.  Like there's never been any pain there.  I swallow. 

Better get a move on.

Five minutes later I emerge into the hallway, travel bag in hand.  Smith waves to me from the far end, at the door to the kitchen.  When I get there I find a teapot and two cups set out on a small table.

"I need a way to track a man," I say, not waiting.  Maybe it'll keep me from blurting out 'Will this last?  Is the stump just asleep or did you do something that's going to make a difference tomorrow, or ten minutes from now?'  Or ten months.  I clear my throat.  "A man who wants this future to come.  Who'd try to make it happen even against the will of the group."

He looks surprised; his lips pressed together.  He sits down and motions for me to do the same.  I take a seat.

"You speak of Spender?" he says, pouring hot liquid into our cups.

"How do you--?"  Should have figured.  I lean back into the chair.  "You know him."  So he's a lot higher up in this than I figured.

"Yes, I do know him."  He raises his cup to his mouth.  "I took an assignment in Washington several years back, a cover job in the Social Security administration, inputting data for the Project. 

"Data on--?"

"Abductees."  Mr. Matter-of-Fact in his slacks and his herringbone jacket.

"So you could keep track of what was going on.  And what, the old man got you the job?" 

Smith hesitates for a split second before nodding.  "Spender is a determined man, a clever strategist."  He pauses.  "Unfortunately, he lacks any appreciation for the strengths of your species.  You're right to consider him dangerous."  He takes a sip of his tea.

I didn't say that—dangerous.  I'm pretty damn sure I didn't.  My fingers tighten around the table leg beside me and my pulse quickens.  I can see my plan for this trip circling the drain.

"So, you wish me to serve as the proverbial fly on the wall?"

It sounds pathetic when he says it.  I swallow, nod, stare at the calendar on the wall beside him.  The 18th is circled in pen.  My face feels like it's on fire.  "I just-- I figured... He doesn't trust anybody.  He's too smart for that.  Bugs are out, wire taps.  The only guy I could trust to try to tail him electronically--"  I shake my head.  He wouldn't get it.  It's just too risky.  Che's not replaceable.

"Unfortunately," Smith starts, "I undertook an action that drew attention to myself about eight months ago.  They sent an Enforcer--a bounty hunter--to kill me.  They believe I'm dead."

So he'd be no use at all in D.C.  Washout.  Total washout.  What made me think this was going to work?

"Contrary to what you might think, it isn't my aim to invade your privacy, Mr. Krycek.  Some things are simply more obvious than others.  As to your agenda, whatever it is, I don't want to know the details.  As they say, I can't tell what I don't know."

I swirl a spoon in my tea, watching a vortex form, then look up.  "If they think you're dead, then what are you doing here?"

"I came"—he shrugs, as if it's obvious—"because you were looking for me."  He pauses to let me try to digest that.  "As I said, I ran afoul of the group.  I don't work here anymore."

Not sure I even want to know how he knew I was looking for him.  I gather my courage and press ahead.  "There's something else I need to know.  There have been abductions recently--ones that don't fit the pattern.  They take people, but they don't bring 'em back.  I've seen it in Kazakhstan, but somebody's been feeding us intel about incidents in other places: Australia, the-- 

"The outback," he muses, almost absently.  "Ecuador.  Finland.  Northern Mexico."

My mouth sits slightly open.  I close it.

"What is your interest here, Mr. Krycek?  Why are you following this?"

"Because I'm trying to figure out a goddamn way to keep this future from happening," I say, half-rising from my seat. "The old men aren't going to do it; they don't give a damn about this planet, or the people on it."

I notice that I'm standing and sit down, brushing a hand past my forehead.  Fuck, that was me? 

Smith looks me over, probably taking some kind of internal inventory I can't stop him from.  Maybe trying to figure out if I meant what I just said.  Hell, I don't know where it came from, either.     

Finally I pick up my tea cup and take a sip.  It's not much more than warm now.  I glance around the room: big commercial stove, wall ovens, pots hanging overhead.

"Why did you come, anyway?" I say now, setting my cup down.  Why would he bother?  And why has he been feeding the Brit these abduction reports?

He takes another drink of his tea, looks at me while he tips the cup gently back and forth and finally sets it down.  "There are facts that need to be known, Mr. Krycek, by someone capable of acting on them.  Misconceptions that will prove fatal if not corrected."  He leans back a little in his chair.  "I brought Fox Mulder here once," he starts.  "To the old location, the one you visited."

I pull up a little straighter.  "Why?"

"I was hoping that--"  He raises his eyebrows in a gesture I can't read.  "He was willing to believe.  To accept.  I hoped he might be the one who could do something with my information, who could fight this invasion.  Who would have the interests of your species at heart."  He sighs.

Interest at heart: Mulder's a sucker for anybody in need... unless it happens to be a certain ex-partner he once worked with.  He'd love to save the world.  He'd get off on being a savior.  "But?" 

"The clones proved a distraction he couldn't see past.  Helpless children--he wanted to save them.  Later he offered the Enforcer his life in exchange for his mother's."  He shrugged.  "Admirable, on an individual level--"

"But you're never going to live long enough to save the world that way."  A smirk plays over my face.  “He's dangerous like that."  Mulder and his precious idealism.  "He has no idea what it would really take to fight this."

"Unfortunately."  He picks up his cup again, brings it halfway to his mouth and sets it down.  "The information I have is critical, but it's also imperative that it not be disclosed until someone is in a position to act on it."

More of his inscrutable shit, the stuff that drove me crazy the first time I visited the colony.  And how do I fit into this?  Why is he telling me about this at all unless he figures he might offer me his secrets?  But it doesn't look like I'm likely to be the lucky recipient of his other-worldly wisdom, so why is he even testing me?

"Things are changing, Mr. Krycek.  Keep track of the abductions.  But don't concern yourself about Spender.  He does present the kind of danger you state, but I have certain connections.  I'll monitor him."  A pause.  "I do appreciate your mentioning him."

I stifle a yawn, pick up my cup and drink down what's left in it.  It's not like Marita and I aren't busting our butts trying to get the vaccine ready to distribute.  Which is a damn sight more than the old men are doing, sitting around smoking their cigars and waiting for alien fire to fall from the sky.  But there's no point in arguing with the guy.  Only he knows what he's got, and when and how he'll decide to dole it out. 

And he did show up.

"Thanks for the tea," I say, taking my cue from his move to stand.  "And this."  The words slip out of me and I nod toward the arm, heat in my face.  "It's been..."  Nothing comes; what could I possibly say?  Awkward seconds pass.  I shake my head.     

"You're tired," he says in that soothing voice, conveniently saving me from any more awkwardness.  He points casually at the clock; it's heading toward 2 a.m.  "It would be a good idea for you to get some sleep.  There's a bed in a small office at the end of the building; I'll show you.  You'll be safe there, but you should leave first thing in the morning.  You have transportation, don't you?"

"Yeah," I say.  "And you?"

"I have to go now."

There's this look in his eyes, a momentary flash of something--worry or indecision or maybe something else--that I don't think he wants me to see.  I mull it over as I lie in the dark a few minutes later, waiting for the mattress underneath me to warm up.

In the morning there's no sign of Smith.  Also no new tire tracks since yesterday, and no other sign of any other way he might have come here.  Makes me wonder what I've gotten myself into, dealing with this alien and having no idea what the implications--or complications--might be.    

At any rate, Smith made it clear enough that I shouldn't stick around.  I call my pilot and arrange for a pickup at the edge of the ginseng rows.  As we're lifting off, I glance down to see all the girl clones looking skyward.  Then their faces go blank.  A moment later they've returned to their weeding and their tin pails.

\-------------------------------

NARRATIVE B

_Krycek finds a way to investigate the mysterious Kazakhstan abductions with the blessings of the Russian government._

 

What exactly Jeremiah Smith did to my arm, and why he did it, I couldn't say, and still can't, but I wasn't about to ask any questions, afraid I might somehow break the spell I'd suddenly fallen under.  I went back to New York and didn't see him again. He'd agreed to keep an eye on the old man, and that had been my goal in going to see him.  Oh, and the arm?  That was the last bout of phantom pain I ever had.

So, two things out of the way and it was back to focusing on the problems at hand.  Our first batch of vaccine was still cooking away, a good two months off from being ready, but ever since the Pavlodar abductions, Tolya had been pulling strings behind the scenes in Moscow to get someone appointed to investigate any subsequent incidents.  Russia had no jurisdiction over Kazakhstan at that point, but the Kazakhs didn't have the funds to set up a team of their own, so the idea Petrovich was pitching--of a Russian team that would investigate, shoulder the expenses, provide valuable intel to Mother Russia and share pertinent bits of it with the locals--went over well with everybody.  Of course, no self-respecting military officer on a career track wanted to be the one in charge of a unit tracking down imaginary aliens, but Petrovich had a solution for that, too: me.  I had to interview for the position, but Petrovich coached me and I was accepted.  It placed me where I was going to need to be in order to safeguard my and Marita's work, but I had to laugh at the irony of it: I'd become the Russian Mulder.

I went back to Pavlodar to do an official investigation of the incidents there, though even with six people we didn't dig up a whole lot more information than I'd gathered the first time.  The trip did bring me into contact with someone I both was and wasn't looking forward to seeing again, a woman named Nika Forisova whose twin sister was one of the abductees.  Until I met Nika I'd kept myself focused on my projects, but getting to know her reminded me that my desire to be something to a woman was anything but dead.  And I was pretty sure the attraction wasn't just one-way.  Granted, it wouldn't have been convenient for either of us and anyway, it was never going to happen: there was no way I was about to get close enough to any woman to have her find out about the piece of plastic that had become a placeholder for my left arm. 

Still, when the time came to return to Pavlodar for the official investigation, I knew I was going to have to interview her again.  And I did, with one of my men present.  Everything was pleasant and cooperative.  Official, business-like and artificial as hell.  But I had work to do.  I went on, led my team through the rest of the interviews, the site investigations, the scouring of outlying areas in search of any evidence I might have missed the first time. 

But when it was over, I knew I had to see Nika one last time. For her sake, at least.  Originally she'd offered me information on the condition that I wouldn't mention her to her brother-in-law, who'd had a history of beating his wife. Nika was afraid if he knew she'd talked, he'd come after her, worried his nasty little secret had been exposed.  But I'd had to interview the guy this time around and I needed to let her know I hadn't mentioned her to him.  She'd already lost her sister. The last thing she needed was having to worry about this Neanderthal going after her.

Our little visit turned out to be the farthest thing from what I was expecting.  

\-----------------------------

SCENE: DEPARTURE

_In Kazakhstan completing an investigation into a series of mysterious abductions five months after losing his arm,Krycek stops to leave a final message with the sister of an abductee, a woman who's helped him investigate... and who's caught his eye.  Takes place after *Zero Sum._

 

The low buzzing starts up in my gut even before I reach the door of the apartment block.  I meant to come here earlier.  Should've come.  I have information that should put her at ease, and if anyone deserves that, she does.  But things aren't so straightforward.

_Because you want her.  You--the gimp with the missing arm--want this krasavitsa.  Fat chance, buddy.  But then you already knew that._

Fact is, my plane flies out in the morning, and I owe this woman.  It's now or never.

I make my way through the dingy hallway and pause outside her door to collect myself.  Arm in place; a little tweak to the hand to make it sit more naturally.  Damn piece of plastic.  Swallowing against the knot inside me, I take a deep breath and knock.

_Nice stance: tall and straight, very official-looking.  Convincing.  You should've gone into acting, Aleksei._

Fuck off.

Muffled footsteps approach from inside and I can hear a voice, Nika turning around, saying something to--

So she's not alone. 

Something drops like lead inside me. 

_Kind of kills the image that's been running a loop in your head lately, doesn't it? The memory of the two of you in that little pump shed, shaking like leaves against each other while a couple of alien craft dip and swoop overhead?_

Whatever.  This is official business.  I'm the head of the investigating team; she's a witness.

_'Official business'.  Right. So holding her when she fell apart in that field, after she'd found the melted mess of her sister's wedding ring--that was just part of your job description._

_Hey, d_ _oor's open, kid.  Go for it._

Nika freezes for a split second when she sees me, her mouth half open.

I shrug. A smile starts to pull at one corner of my mouth.  "Dobriy vecher." 

So much for keeping up the stern, official front.

She's tired, worn down from the stress of the last six weeks, since her sister went missing, and it shows.  Still, she's beautiful.  "Dobriy vecher," she says, opening the door wider.  And now there's a glow on her face that wasn't there before.

From somewhere inside, a baby's cry splits the silence.   Nika turns and hurries toward it, long dark hair spinning behind, a sort of slow motion thing.  At least as I see it.  Come, she calls back to me.  So I do. 

_Just like one of Pavlov's dogs._

The fussing's coming from somewhere on the floor beyond the couch, but I can't see over it from where I am.  I clear my throat.  "Yzvinite--" 

_No need to apologize._

Except that I should have come yesterday rather than leaving her to worry for another day.

"I talked to your brother-in-law," I start, conscious of the dry rasp in my voice.  I clear my throat.  "Made it clear that cooperation with the investigating team is required.  He's been assured that you never mentioned him."  Or the way he beat his wife.

"He asked about me?"

"As soon as he found out who we were, yeah."

She can only shake her head. 

Son of a bitch had better not come knocking on her door.

Nika's crouched down, her back to me, gathering the baby up from a nest of blankets on the floor.  "Please, have a seat, captain," she says, and I settle myself on the couch.  When she turns around again she's got the kid in her arms.

Not at all what I expected.  Boy's maybe two, not much older.  Cross-eyed, with little stumps of arms waving in the air as he fusses.  When the blanket shifts, it's obvious that he doesn't have much more in the way of legs.

"Semey," she says, her frustration focused into a single word, the name of a city to the east.  After forty years of nuclear testing, the place is a toxic hell and kids born there pay the price.

But she doesn't seem to think of him as a statistic. She introduces us as if he were as normal as anybody else.  His name is Pasha, she says, bringing him close.  A cousin's kid.  For a second I'm lost but I've got to do something.  After a beat--what the hell--I stick a finger out toward the reaching kid.  He taps it with the end of a stump, flashes a crooked smile and burrows his head into the soft black curls beside Nika's neck.

Then the two of them settle into the faded red chair across from me, the kid in her lap, wiggling every once in a while, trying to squirm his way off, and we trade small talk. 

_S_ _he's got the hots for you, you know.  Cute.  If it weren't for the kid, you might have a chance tonight.  But think about it, Aleksei: if you got lucky and everything fell into place, would she be ready for that plastic excuse for an arm you're wearing?_

_Didn't think so._

Nika handles the boy instinctively, without looking, careful and easy.  Kisses the side of his neck just to hear him giggle.  Soon I'm lost in the easy, flowing movement of her hands, the stray hairs that cling to the side of her neck, the color in her cheeks when she smiles at the kid. 

_Yeah, keep your expectations low.  Saves you from being disappointed._

"... Captain?"

I pull myself back to the moment.

"Tea?"

I manage to nod.  "Thanks."  And before I know what's happening, she's plopped the kid in my lap.  For a few seconds her hand is over mine, pressing carefully against the kid's middle to make sure he's secure.

_Good thing she got the live hand.  Could've been a bad scene there._

The kid wiggles, settling against my leg.  I frown and lean back a little to make sure he doesn't fall, afraid he might squirm away. 

A kid.  What the hell do I--? 

Now he throws himself back against me, raises one of his little stumps, tries to poke at my nose. It doesn't seem to bother her, the shape he's in.  Like she sees past it.

"Here--"

Tea arrives in a fancy little gold-rimmed cup, a family heirloom she's used to serve me before.  She hovers above me a second, leaving warmth and the vague spice of perfume in her wake.  Five weeks ago it was the two of us on this couch, two matching cups filled with tea, polite conversation--a thank you for making the effort to look into her sister's disappearance as if it were more than just a bureaucratic assignment to be stamped and submitted to a supervisor.  As if her sister actually mattered. 

I'd done the right thing then, kept everything neat and clean.

_You c_ _hickened out, plain and simple.  You could have had her.  Easily.  Except that it would have exposed your ugly little secret._

Nika takes the boy, and our fingers pass each other.  I swallow before the cup reaches my lips.

In the chair across from me Pasha settles into Nika's lap.  She sips from the teacup with one hand, leans the boy out of grabbing range with the other, an easy, practiced movement.  Rocks him side to side, just a little at first, then gradually more as she begins to hum something.  Something familiar, an old Russian nursery rhyme I probably haven't heard since I was a scrawny kid in diapers.

When I find the words rumbling in my throat, off-key and gravelly, I clam up in a hurry.  But Nika glances up and smiles, a sudden flash of sunlight from between gray clouds, and I start in again, for as awkward as it feels, and the two of us finish the verse together.  Anything for a glimpse of that smile.

Then she's up, whisking the kid off to bed.  I stand, stretch my shoulders against the pinch of the harness, check the dead hand for position.  Glance around the room: patterned wallpaper, neat stacks of belongings on an old buffet, two dining chairs wedged beside a tiny table, a sweater laid over the back of one.  I go closer, hesitate, finally reach out and run two fingers over the soft surface.

A door closes.  Quickly I slip my hand into my pocket, take a couple of steps back and she's in front of me, apologizing for the distraction, brushing stray hairs from that soft face of hers.  But she falls quiet soon enough.  Fatigue--grief--creeps back over her like a cloud, and as for me, words don't seem to come.  I've already told her what I came here to say--all I have to offer, which is barely anything.  There's no hope of her sister being returned, judging from the abduction patterns I've been seeing.  To say nothing of the future. The last thing she needs is to know about that.

Life can be such a bitch.

"No news?" she asks.

All I can do is shake my head. 

"Sorry.  I didn't mean to push, Captain."

"Not captain."  Formality's never fit me.  "Mikhail."

"Mikhail."  The word is soft around her tongue.

 _Good thing she doesn't know_ _who you really are.  Or what you do.  She wouldn't be standing here next to you for long._

"No more abductions."  I clear my throat.  "We just finished checking everywhere within 50 kilometers for sightings, or any evidence we might have missed.  Nothing."

"So you'll return to Moscow now?"

"Yeah."

All this time we've been moving toward the door, and now we're nearly there.

"Thanks," I say.  "For the tea."  She's been like glowing coals, a warmth that's reached all the way to the permanent chill fixed deep inside my bones.

"And to you.  For coming back.  For helping."  She sighs and her head goes down.  "To have someone actually look, when usually any problem means they will deny everything..."

She's so close now.

Half a dozen trite phrases I wish I could offer and mean them: you have your whole life ahead of you; things will get better; we'll figure out who's behind this.  We'll find your sister.

I'll be back. 

But I won't, and she already knows it.  The investigation that brought me here is finished, and unless there are more abductions in the area, I'm not likely to ever see this place again.

Nika's head is still down.  I close my eyes.  The room is silent except for the sounds of shaky breathing.

Then warmth touches my cheek.  Soft lips, soft breath, and pretty soon our mouths find each other, careful at first, then deep and slow.  The heat that comes with it wakes every cell in my body.

 _Here's_   _your big chance, Romeo._

Nika buries her face against the side of my neck, shakes her head as if she needs to apologize for what just happened.  I work to cover my ragged breathing, swallow away the raw stab of need. 

_Last chance.  Wouldn't take more than a nudge, now, to sway things._

"I wish-- " she says into my shirt.  "But I've already lost my sister.  I couldn't stand to lose someone else, too." 

It's all I can manage to murmur something into her hair, tip her chin, offer a hint of a smile.  "Do vstrechi, Nikochka."  I run the back of a finger over the softness of her cheek. 

Then it's over.  The door's open and the echo of her 'do vstrechi' follows me out into the hallway.  My face burns against the sudden chill.  The taste of her fills me as I make my way to the stairs.

\---------------------------

NARRATIVE C

_Krycek finds out more about what makes Marita tick._

 

When I left Pavlodar, I flew back to Moscow and left my report with Petrovich, and then it was off to the U.S. to make my usual rounds while the big clock ticked slowly closer to the day our first batch of vaccine would be ready.  I met with the Brit; checked in with Ché, who'd been keeping tabs on Mulder. Spent some time looking for an apartment I could keep in D.C  Flew back to New York and met with Marita.

In a way I guess I'd sort of assumed that Marita had sprung full-grown from a briefcase.  Sometimes it seemed that way, as if she were the kind of woman who'd had no past, maybe no childhood or learning curve but just the present, where she was always capable, always on top of things.  Not that it came without effort; it was obvious that she worked hard, putting in long hours at her UN post and then having to deal with the old men and her own contacts after her workday was over.  By the time we'd meet, you could see the drawn expression, the hollow spaces under her eyes.

It could have been the fatigue that made her slip during our meeting that time, when she let out that it was her brother's birthday.  It made me realize that I'd never pictured her having roots, or connections to things other than this project or the father I only knew as a name.  She also told me that her father's old friend, the doctor he'd positioned inside the consortium, wanted to see me the next day.  It made me curious as to what he wanted.  But I was also determined, in the process, to see if I could get him to fill in some of the gaps in this woman I'd ended up allying with.

Anyway I called Ansbach and he gave me a time and an address, some little import-export office a friend of his owned.  Made sense; he had to be watching his back like anybody else in the organization who didn't actually buy into the party line.  I took a cab to the place, went inside, and when I asked for Bill, the secretary took me upstairs, to what served as a lunch room.  Ansbach was there waiting for me.

"Alex," he said, rising from the chair where he'd been sitting in front of a checkerboard.  He seemed glad to see me, more casual than the first time we met.

"Miguel." I shook the hand he held out.

"Sit, sit," he said, and I made my way around to the far side of the table and took a seat.  Ansbach was wearing a button-front sweater and a tie, looking more like somebody's grandfather than a consortium researcher. 

"Coffee?  Cerveza? 

The beer sounded better, but it might mean a bottle with a top I couldn't get off without giving away the arm.  But Ansbach was already reaching up into a cabinet.  He brought out two glasses, pulled a couple of bottles from the fridge and reached for an old-fashioned bottle opener attached to the edge of the counter. 

All smooth enough that it made me wonder if Marita'd told him about me.  Not sure whether I liked the idea that she might have.

"I suppose you're wondering why I asked to see you," he said as he sat down and passed me one of the glasses.

I took a drink.  "Marita said something about the vaccine."

"Yes, that's one thing.  All these years while we've had nothing real to work with--just hope--I've been researching topical vaccines.  The current production will be wonderful, of course, an admirable start."  He stopped to take a sip.  "But in the larger scheme of things, the greater the number of people you can save, as we've discussed previously, the better off we all will be.  A topical vaccine--say, one that could be disguised as perfume or suntan lotion, infused into restroom soap or painted on children at fairs as face paint--"  His arms reached wide.  "The possibilities are endless."

I found myself pulling forward.  It was a damn good idea.

"The critical difference is the use of a plasmid-DNA vector rather than the traditional viral vector..."  He paused, realizing he'd already lost me.  "But I won't bore you with the technical details.  At any rate, I'll be needing a vial of the vaccine you'll be picking up three weeks from now."

Something inside me tightened.  "You don't need my permission for that." 

"No.  Though Marita wanted me to run it past you."

I shrugged.  "An undetectable vaccine?  It'd be a dream come true."  A damn sight better than having to think up scams to get people vaccinated; there were so many ways for things to go wrong.  I nodded past him.  "Where are you planning to work on this?"

Ansbach stood and broke into a grin.  Obviously, he'd been waiting for me to ask.  "Come," he said, "I'll show you."

And he took me up three flights to a room outfitted as a lab... and not a cheap one, either, if I knew what I was looking at.  The room was hidden behind a false wall, which meant the old men and their snooping were obviously on his mind.

"Everything I should need at this stage," he said, waving a hand to encompass the various pieces of equipment.  Gradually his expression changed, though, his exuberance settling into something more sober.  "But this isn't why I asked to see you." 

He pulled out a stool, sat and motioned for me to do the same.  Cautiously I took the hint, wondering where this was leading.

"I was a good friend of Martín's, and since his death I think I've come to look at Marita as my responsibility.  Not that she's asked me to, mind you.  She's an independent one.  Still, old loyalties die hard,  _entiende_?"

I raised an eyebrow, wanting to offer some kind of neutral response, but I was beginning to feel like a teenager ushered into a side room by his date's dad.

"Marita has been under a lot of stress.  Not just recently, but for years, really.  To her credit she adapted remarkably well to being moved here when her father was forced into the project fourteen years ago.  She continued with school, went on to the university, got good marks."  He paused for a second.  "She'd planned a career as an art dealer, you know."

My mouth opened.

"Of course, when her father explained the larger picture to her, good soldier that she is, she returned immediately to the university to get a degree in international relations.  And, in due time, she hired on at the United Nations... and, unfortunately, out of necessity"--he sighed--"with the group."

"She mentioned a brother last night," I said, to see what kind of reaction that would get.

Ansbach paused, surprised.  "She spoke of Colin?" 

"Didn't mention any names.  Just that he was younger than her and died in a riding accident."  I shrugged.  "It was kind of a passing remark.  Not sure she meant to make it."

"She rarely speaks of Colin."

"Or her father," I said, seeing my opening.  "She seems to avoid the subject, actually.  There doesn't seem to be a single picture of him in her apartment.  Seems odd for somebody who's taken over the family mantle, don't you think?"

Ansbach gave me a look--not exactly hostile, but a search for where I was going with this, what my motives were.  Finally he sighed and looked away, out through the foggy glass of a bank of old windows. 

"Look, this is something I need to know from you," I said, pulling closer, trying to keep it low-key, though I could feel the intensity ratcheting up in my voice.  "I was talking to someone the other day--someone on the inside--who told me Martín's autopsy showed signs of poisoning, that it didn't kill him but probably shortened his life."  I waited for him to look at me before I went on.  "This source thought Marita might have had something to do with it."

I couldn't tell whether Ansbach was shocked by the accusation or just by the fact that I'd bring it up.

"Now, I'm in this for the long haul," I went on.  "I know how critical it is to save as many people as possible; without this program we're all dead.  But I need to know if I should be watching my back as well as the sky.  This vaccine is everything I've ever worked for and I'm not about to let anybody cheat me out of it."

It took a second before Ansbach's mouth closed.  "Alex, I--"  He gave a helpless shrug.  "I understand your concern.  I realize you haven't known Marita long, and certainly it's been fortuitous that you met, each of you holding a key element to the success of Martín's plan.  Let me assure you that Marita has dedicated her life to this project.  She's laid aside any aspirations for her own life, any sort of personal fulfillment, in order to see this plan through to its proper completion.  She would never do anything to jeopardize this program."

"What about the poison in her father's system?"

"As I said, I've been a close friend of the family's for many years.  Martín requested that I join the research so he would have an ally on the inside to forward his secret plan--"

"You were supposed to steal the vaccine when they were successful?"

"Yes, but it never came.  And in the meantime I've had to do many things--sometimes terrible things--to hold my place within the organization, to be ready if and when the plan came together.  And then before anything did, Martín was diagnosed.  He had six months.  It quickly became evident that his treatment was going to be in vain, and much as he wanted to fight his disease, Martín was a realist.  He saw no purpose in putting his daughter, his only remaining child, through the trauma of watching him deathly sick from the therapy when there was no hope of recovery. 

"So he made the decision to quit the treatments, to try to live as best he could in his final months.  For the first six weeks or so he was fairly comfortable, lucid... He and Marita took a short trip to Mallorca, stayed in a friend's home with a private beach where he could sit by the water."  He let out a deep sigh.  "Well, and that was it.  They returned, Martín almost immediately took a turn for the worse, and--"  Ansbach turned away momentarily. His Adam's apple dipped. 

He stood up, went to the window and stared out through the dirty glass.  A sigh came out of him and his shoulders sagged. 

"He was soon bedridden, and he began to ramble, to talk semi-coherently.  The group's doctors continued to attend him, of course, and when once we'd heard him mention his beloved vaccine plan, there wasn't much choice, really." 

Slowly he began to walk the perimeter of the room, his hands moving in explanation as he talked. 

"The plan was Martín's penitence, in his eyes, and his salvation as well--to know he'd done something worthwhile, something that made up for the actions he'd been forced to take after he came to New York."  He looked up at me.  "It was either save the plan, or preserve what little time Martín had left, thereby destroying the plan he'd devoted so many years to developing."

"He could have exposed you two."

"Quite easily.  But it meant far more than two lives saved. It wasn't as mercenary as it would sound to a novice.  Surely you realize that."

I nodded, looking at nothing.  It's one of those places where life bites you.  We hope for loyalty in the people we deal with, but  _being_  loyal when something critical's at stake--sometimes it's just not in the cards.  

"Our personal safety was nothing compared to what the world could lose--what humankind stood to lose--without the blessing of Martín's foresight, and the plan he'd set in motion."  Ansbach glanced down, then up again and paused a long moment.  "The toxin was my idea.  The one we selected interfered with his reasoning and speech, so if he managed to say anything at all, it was rarely coherent.  At first we only administered it before a doctor's appointment, or when we knew one of the Elders would be coming to see him.  But the farther he progressed, the more he focused on the plan, and we couldn't take that chance."

Ansbach had finished his loop of the room. Now he was standing in front of me.  He wiped a hand across his brow and dropped into his chair.  He looked older somehow.  "It shouldn't have shown up in the autopsy results.  It was only an unfortunate interaction with another drug he was being given at the end that caused it to show up in the tox screen."

"And the old men?" I asked.  "It didn't raise any kind of red flag for them?"

"Oh, they saw it.  But it was a low-level dosage, and though Marita had been taking care of him, they could see no reason why she should have been the cause--"

"No reason she would have for getting him out of the way."

"Yes."  He took in a deep breath.  "Of course they regarded her with suspicion for a time just on general principles, but Marita is careful and thorough in her work, and Martín was, to their mind, never more than a lower-level functionary, not so very important.  So in time all was forgotten and things ran along as always."  He glanced toward the window again.  "As if Martín had never been."

My mouth opened slightly, but what was there to say?  I'd taken out my share of inconvenient people, but there'd never been a need to do it to anyone who would have made a difference to me.  Now, if we were talking about...

Hell, what did it say that nobody came to mind?  Maybe a girl I knew for a while when I was still pretty much fresh off the boat.  Or Mulder. If the old man were to tell me to take out Mulder, slowly...

For as much a pain in the ass as Mulder'd been, I couldn't say.  I had no idea what that would be like.

"Which," Ansbach continued, "brings us full circle to what I'd begun to say.  Marita is a driven woman, perhaps more driven than most because she's had to give up everything she's ever had, or desired, and what is left?  Now she works, works, works to make this plan a reality."  He gestured toward me.  "And you, we're very glad to have your contribution to this project, the vaccine and your background and input, and what I'm about to say to you I don't broach out of anything personal you may have done.  But the fact is, behind it all, that you're a man and she's a woman.  Sometimes, even in the middle of a deep investment in other things, when you least expect it, what's only natural creeps in.  Just remember what she's already had to bear, Alex; that's all I'm asking.  Don't make her load any heavier or more cumbersome than it is already."

Three weeks later his remark would light up like neon in my brain, but in the moment I nodded, still a little dazed by everything he'd said, and by what he'd slipped in there so neatly at the end.  The last thing on my mind was screwing Covarrubias.

"No, we're in this together," I heard myself say.  "What shakes one of us is going to shake the other.  I'm not going to do anything to rock the boat."

At that point we were both getting a little awkward, but somehow we managed to close the conversation.  I mumbled something about having to get to another appointment.

On the way downstairs, what Ansbach had told me continued to run through my head.  Fact: Marita was completely dedicated to making this plan work, whether for the promise of salvation or through guilt or sheer drive.  It should have put me at ease, but the fact was I was still jittery.  Maybe I just needed to know her better in person, though the background definitely helped. 

And I sure as hell wasn't going to do anything to sabotage it, or her. That would be suicide.  It wasn't like some financial scheme, where there's motivation for one party to get rid of the other so he can keep all the money for himself.  In this plan the payoff was survival, and neither of us was going to get there alone, or at the other's expense.

I admit I spent some time afterward trying to fit the woman I knew to the things Ansbach had told me, but I reminded myself that in another two and a half weeks I'd probably know more because Marita and I would be meeting in Cali to pick up the first batch of vaccine, and we'd be spending a couple of days there.  Every meeting I'd had with her had its little unexpected, revealing turns, and I wondered what this trip would bring.

In the meantime I returned to D.C., managed to finally find myself that apartment I'd been looking for, and then decided I was overdue for a change of scenery.  I'd been doing nothing but running, and even my dreams were starting to be filled with a constant blur of things I needed to do but couldn't quite manage to accomplish.  I'd been thinking for a while about setting up some sort of a safe house in case the alien hordes showed up on our doorstep early--someplace far enough north that the Oil wouldn't be on its best game, but an area with enough infrastructure to get by on its own if it were cut off from the rest of civilization.  The East Coast seemed like a bad gamble--too many strategic cities the aliens would likely be gunning for--and I'd had this tickle in my head about the West Coast ever since I'd passed through Vancouver on my way to Singapore after the car bomb.  So I decided I might as well check the area out. 

Once I got there, though, the desire to get away from the insanity that had been my life for the previous few months overwhelmed everything else, and I ended up taking a ferry out to the Gulf Islands, to a place called Mayne, and stayed there for a week.  It was the off season by then and nearly all the tourists were gone.  I rented a little cabin above a beach and it was more amazing than I can say to just sit there in the big, lazy old rocker on the porch and fall asleep in the sun, then wake up a few hours later to find everything still peaceful; only the sky and clouds had changed.  I did spend my last couple of days back on the mainland, checking out the various areas there as potential safe house material, and then it was off to Cali to see what my weekend with Marita would bring.

There was no way I ever could have imagined how that weekend would go.  What can I say?  Picture two people meeting in a tropical country to pick up the first shipment of a vaccine that could save the world.  Picture a hot, humid weekend spent in an apartment with a swimming pool and a broken air conditioner.  Picture two jet-lagged people who are used to guarding their privacy slipping up and letting out a lot more than they'd intended.  

\---------------------------

SCENE: CONVERGENCE

_In Cali to pick up the first shipment of their secret vaccine, Krycek and Marita learn more about each other as their reserved, private selves begin to unravel._

 

 **Thursday, 4 p.m.**  
Apartment in the upscale Ciudad Jardín neighborhood  
Cali, Colombia

I get in before Marita, head straight to the apartment--piso, they call it--rummage for the first few minutes among the things in the fridge, which Marita's had someone stock, and then hit the sack.  At least the bed here is comfortable. I fall asleep almost immediately and wake up again around 10 p.m., a warm breeze rippling the thin curtains in the window.  It feels good.

From the closed bedroom door and a couple of bags left on the sofa, I can see that Marita's arrived.  My guess is that she's out just like I've been, trying to sleep off the flight.  And I'm not about to wake her.  Anyway, the air is warmer than I'd realized at first; the pool outside is sounding pretty good, and the last thing I need is an audience.  I go outside, wave my hand through the water: nice.  Back in the room I dig out a pair of swim trunks, then think about how I'll cover up if I need to.  Shirt?  That would look stupid in this weather.  Towel over the shoulder?  Maybe if it's big enough.  I go hunting in the bathroom closet; sure enough, there are big towels.  I take one and head outside.

I'm not going to be able to swim like I used to, but at this point I'm just looking to sit in the water, cool off, relax and maybe float a little--if I can manage it.  I drop the towel within reach of the edge and go down three steps, then four, and I've hit bottom.  The water's just right--no shock of cold but not warm enough to pretend to be something that belongs in a bathtub.  I crouch down, let my arm rise and feel myself begin to drift a little.  After a moment I stand up, walk slowly to the far side, then down toward the deep end until I'm chest-high in the water.  No sense doing anything stupid, though, like hitting the deep end, so I cross the pool, take hold of a rope loop where it fastens into a thick chrome hook and let my legs float up and drift.  It feels good, actually.  After a few seconds I stretch out, tip my head back and look up into the dark sky overhead.

Fourteen hours.  After all these months, only fourteen more hours until we meet Arizábal at FarmaCol and see the first of the vaccine, the dream finally become reality.  I picture the building and then tuck the image away in a back corner of my head.  No point in dwelling on it, keeping yourself awake like a kid on Christmas Eve.  It's not that late--not for a place with hot weather and late night life--and I can hear cars and buses four floors down, and random bits of conversation drifting up from patios below, or from the building across from us.

After a couple of minutes a light goes on inside.  I fight down a mild jolt of panic and watch as Marita crosses the kitchen, wrapped in some sort of thin robe.  She takes a bottle of water from the refrigerator and the light goes out again.  If she stops to look out here, I won't be able to tell.  She knows about the arm now, but knowing about it and actually coming to terms with the sight of it are two different things.  I tell myself to stay where I am, keep floating, not look like I'm trying to escape in case she does come out. 

But the door doesn't open, and eventually I pull up, make my way to the stairs and sit there for a while watching the patterns in the water, surprised to find that my head isn't full of random bits of strategy and details that need taking care of.  The past week on that island must have done me more good than I realized.  I need to remember that the next time I find myself going crazy.

Finally I slip back into the water.  I stretch out, right side down, and make my way across the width of the pool in a passable attempt at a sidestroke.  After all, I may need it someday and there's no use waiting until some critical moment to find out what my capabilities are.

After a few more passes across the pool I get out, towel off and go back to bed.  When I wake up again there's sun shining in the window, it's hot and the nervous backbeat that was missing the night before starts up in my gut.  Two hours and counting.

 

**Friday  
Cali, Colombia**

The meeting goes by in a kind of blur.  Arizábal is a little shorter than me, balding, a conservative dresser with good taste in suits.  He's also thorough and precise.  Once again, Marita's picked the right man for the job.  We see the boxes; he opens one for us and notes that the labels on the vials are easily peeled off, evidently one of Marita's requirements, though Arizábal probably has no idea why.  It's good strategy.  If we need to change our story for any batch--bill it as something different--this will make it easy.

At the end we spend a few minutes in Arizábal's office.  He and Marita settle into Spanish while my thoughts drift to the vials--what it felt like the first time I held one, the tension of getting it out of the camp, knowing what Lev could do to me if I were caught with it.  Andrei's help, not just with the vaccine but the way he'd been there to prod me after I lost the arm, how he'd drag me out on walks and the way he weaned me off the sleeping pills I could've dead-ended on.  At the time, the idea that without the arm I might be able to do anything to counter the alien threat was beyond comprehending.  And yet here I am.  There's a lesson in it.

They're standing now, so I get up, too.  Thanks all around, hands offered, and I add my own 'gracias'.

Arizábal's called us a cab, and Marita and I stand outside in the front patio waiting for it, wound up like anything, both of us trying not to show it. 

"Well," she says finally, but no more words follow, just a gradually growing glow like nothing I've seen on her before.

"Two days." I shrug, trying to sound casual.  Take that, you conniving old fuckers in the board room.

Marita's wearing a flowered dress--nothing loud, but a real switch for her.  It's sleeveless and shows off a lot of pale arm.  There are muscles there, too--subtle, but you can follow the outline.  I watch the steady beat of the pulse in her neck.

"Are you hungry?" she says just as the cab pulls up. 

I feel my face flush.  "What?"

"I'm starving," she says, opening the door.  "What about you?"

I go around to the other side.  "Yeah, but--" 

"I know this little place," she says, a gleam in her eye, and her head slips below the roof of the car.

I open my door and get in.

"Secluded," she says, answering the concern she knows I'll have about security.  "Not the type of place where anyone who was looking would see us."

I shrug an 'okay' and Marita gives the driver directions.  We leave the university area and gradually drive into an older, colonial-looking section of the city with narrow cobblestone streets.

She's right about the secluded part; they seat us at a private table in a little alcove around the corner from the main dining room. 

"You know I have no clue what's on this menu," I say after giving it a good glance. 

"Then I guess you're at my mercy."  The delivery is dry, but there's that spark of something in her eye again.  Maybe just life; she's obviously having a hard time staying inside that buttoned-up persona she usually wears.  "What do you want, Alex?"

"Something to fill me up.  Meat or fish and whatever comes with it."  I shrug.

"Okay."  The corners of her mouth curl just a little and I can't figure out whether it's a 'cat ate the bird' smile or just the fact of the FarmaCol meeting being past.

Wine comes, and some kind of appetizer, potato slices in a yellowy sauce, the whole thing decorated with hard-boiled eggs.  I take a few sips from my glass, look around, finally bring my focus back to the table and notice that Marita's been doing the same.  I can't shake the buzz from what we've just seen: thousands of vials of real vaccine.  Not a dream anymore, but reality. 

"Hell, this is like the elephant in the middle of the room," I say, shaking my head.  "Like you want to, you know, shout it to the rooftops but you can't."

"I know," she says.  She flashes a hundred-watt smile at the end and then abruptly shuts it off and colors.  Funny how things slip out like that after some tight situation has peaked and you're on the downhill side.

I  _am_  hungry; it hits me now and I dig into the stuff on the plate in front of us.  There's a single olive decorating the dish and Marita quickly spears it.  Her face has softened, a little bit of another Marita peeking through that she hasn't let me see before.  I wonder how many there are.

"Hungry for a taste of home?" I say, hoping it might be a lead-in to more about her past.  We are, after all, in a Peruvian restaurant.

She nods, mouth half full.

"Guess it's been a while, from what Miguel said.  You went to New York when?"

"1984," she says when she can pause.  "I was fifteen."

I shake my head.  Must have been a bitch for someone who figured she had her whole life ahead of her.  "And before that?"

"We had property outside the capital," she says, swallowing the last of what's in her mouth.  "My grandfather raised horses.  I was a child: I went to school, learned to ride, played with friends.  I led a normal life.  Did homework, fed chickens--"

I almost laugh, but manage to cough it down.  Marita's looking past me.  The expression on her face says it was a good childhood.

"And you?" she says. 

Should have seen it coming. 

I shrug.  "Not much to tell.  Russia: long winters, snow, freezing wind.  Short summers.  Not exactly the life of luxury.  Someplace tropical like this"--I gesture around me--"I never would have believed anything like this existed."  Maybe I can steer this off in another direction.

"Your parents?"

Shit. 

I let out a sigh, fiddle with the napkin beside my plate and shake my head.  I could make up some couple--a mother who was a doctor, a research scientist father--or the cold war immigrants I'd given Mulder--but why bother?  I'm going to be in this thing long-term and there's no point in getting caught in my story somewhere further down the line.

"No parents," I say, and shrug.

She seems a little taken aback by that, but just as she's about to say something else, our food arrives.  She's ordered me some kind of beef dish, and luckily the pieces are small enough to be manageable without a knife.  The conversation dies while we focus on eating.

By the end of the meal we're both full, and both tired and hot, too; unlike yesterday, when things were more than bearable, today the thermometer's just kept climbing.  Marita calls a cab and we head back to the apartment.  She says she's going to try to catch up on her sleep, and I intend to do the same.  That is, just as soon as I can get the harness off and clean up the stump.  Unfortunately, I've found out a little bit about what sweat in the socket can lead to.  Luckily, things didn't get very far before I got it taken care of, but who would have figured skin health could be such a big deal?

When I wake up it's nearly 7 p.m. and almost completely dark.  Still hot.  The humidity's been a bitch today and it's still close to 80 degrees.  Which is probably why the swimming pool's calling me again.  I get up and head for the bathroom, wondering if my swim trunks have dried from last night, but a glance outside tells me the pool is already occupied.  I push out a hard breath.  Marita's swimming lazy laps against the turquoise-lit water.

For a while I stand at the window, watching, but she doesn't notice me.  Sweat beads on my forehead and starts to trickle down my temples.  The apartment's air conditioning unit is broken--just our luck--so if I stay here, I'm going to slowly cook, which doesn't sound like much of a way to spend the next dozen hours.  Anyway, Marita shouldn't have the only access to keeping cool.

Easier said than acted on, though.  I have no desire to play freak show, and getting used to the stump requires a lot of staring; it did even for me.  Awkward as it's likely to be, though, it will probably have to happen sometime.  Maybe better just to go out there and get it over with.  Unless I want to stay here and melt into a puddle, that is. 

A knot settles low in my gut, but I go into the bathroom, get changed, grab my towel.  Take a deep breath--okay, more than one--and head outside.  I tell myself it's a preemptive strike, good strategy.  If she gives me any grief, or any maudlin sympathy, though, there's no telling how this will go.

Marita's just made a turn at the shallow end and is headed back toward the deep end, so I'm able to make it down the first three stairs and sit before she catches sight of me.  She bursts up from underwater, her eyes widening suddenly.

"You scared me," she says, and lets out a deep breath.

I shrug.  My heart's banging like a drum.

"Did you sleep?"  She shakes her head, and wet hair and drops of water go flying.

"Yeah, until I woke up in a pool of sweat."  The water's up to my chest, so the edge of the stump is just below the surface.  Which means I can look somewhere near normal.  For the moment, anyway.

"The air conditioner's being repaired," she says, coming closer.  "There was a misunderstanding about the date we were arriving, which is why it's out now.  I'm sorry."  A momentary pause.  "I imagine the heat must be uncomfortable for your... ar--"

"Stump." 

"Stump," she repeats after a moment's hesitation.  Her jaw clenches a little around the word.

And I lift it slightly, so it's out of the water, wondering why the hell I'm exposing it, but knowing, somewhere in the back of my mind, that it has to be better to just have the confrontation and get past it.  If it's going to be possible to get past something that holds your attention the way this does.

It's obvious Marita wants to turn away, either because it bothers her or because she doesn't want to be caught gawking, but she makes herself keep looking until she's really seen it. 

Time's starting to tick away awkwardly.  I ease the stump back into the water but don't look away; I'm not going to be the first one to blink.

"I'm sorry," she says, her tone quiet, not the challenging way she has of addressing you.  "And since I realize I have no way of knowing what this has put you through, I won't try to say anything... trite, or convenient."

Now it's me who's caught off-guard.  "Thanks."  I let out a breath and look up into the darkening sky, where half a fuzzy, cloud-covered moon hangs overhead, and then down again.  I run my hand back through my hair.  "Some party, eh?"

"A private party," she says.  "Inside a prison of our own choosing.  We did choose this."

"Not that there was much real choice."  I raise an eyebrow, then nod toward the deep end.  "You swim much?"

"I like to.  But over the last few weeks--"  She lets out a little sigh.  "There's been no time, really."

"Take advantage," I say.  "While you can.  I went away for a week.  Did me good.  Just the sea shore, a cabin, trees.  Quiet."

I can see her wanting to ask where, but she doesn't.  Instead she turns and swims off, starting her lap again.  I watch her in her one-piece suit, white and simple but it shows her off well.  She wanted to be an art dealer.  I shake my head.

Eventually I go down the last couple of steps, walk down a few feet, then dip under to wash the sweat off my face.  The cool water feels really good.  Over to the side, Marita swims by, long legs kicking.

I make my way to the rope loop, get a good grip on it and let myself drift.  Experimenting a little, I discover that if I cross the good arm over the other shoulder, I can balance out my weight and float as upright as anybody.

For a while we ignore each other and each do our own thing.  Until I notice that the sound of splashing water has stopped.  I glance over to see Marita by the far side of the pool, straining to look at something behind her left shoulder.

"What's up?"

"I think something bit me."

"What?"

"A bug, I think." 

And she wades over to the stairs, gets out, rubs a towel over herself and goes inside.  A few seconds later the light in her bathroom goes on. 

She's a damn good-looking woman, as Junior downstairs has woken up to tell me in case I'd somehow missed the fact.  I remind myself of The Piranha--Maria Ivanova--in an attempt to get things back to normal.  Marita's more leopard than piranha; she's got the bite, but she's more than just a set of teeth.  Besides, Marita's not out trolling for a boy toy the way Ivanova was.  Hell, her gut reaction would probably be to push anyone away.  Wonder what it would take to make that smile she usually hides so well break through the armor she wears.  Or make her want to throw the armor off.

The image that comes doesn't help things, though, so I look up, to where the half-moon glows behind a thin layer of cloud cover.  Two weeks.  Two weeks until the next big scam, with all the things that could go wrong trying to get a large number of people to accept The Flu Shot That Isn't.  I just hope they've been able to do something about the after-effects of the injection itself, because at least when I got mine, it hurt like hell for way too long; that in itself could expose us in pretty short order.  A low thrum of tension starts up in my gut.

My head is full enough that I don't hear Marita coming outside again.  I'm surprised when I glance up and see her sitting on the chaise lounge.  She's reaching back, trying to touch the spot, but she stops when she notices me watching.

"What was it?" I say.

"An insect bite, apparently."

"It hurt?"

"More annoyance than actual pain," she says.

"They have dangerous bugs around here?"

"You mean the kinds that carry neurotoxins or cause necrosis?"

Where your flesh rots away.  My expression must give me away because she flashes her trademark sardonic smile. 

"Not in urban areas like this, Alex.  In the jungle, though..."

Remind me to stay out of the jungle.  At least a good old-fashioned Russian winter is cold enough to kill off anything like that.

I let myself submerge again to cool off, decide to try swimming under the surface to see how that goes.  I push off one wall, do a few strokes that manage to get me to the opposite side and come up sputtering for air.  Not great.  But then I'm out of shape.  Seemed more efficient than on the surface, if I could just get the breathing part right.

When I look again, Marita's rubbing her shoulder.

"Maybe I should take a look at it," I say. 

"Will you?" 

The softness in her voice takes me by surprise.  She comes to the edge of the pool and down the stairs.

"Come here.  Turn around."

There's a little welt on her shoulder blade.  I touch it and she winces.  But it's too dark to really see what's going on.

"We should go inside," I say.  "Where there's light."

We get out, towel off, go inside and into her bathroom.  There's a small mirror over the sink but she stands away from it.  Little bottles and jars cluster on the counter--make-up and lotions, the kind of stuff women keep with them.  And a little round plastic case, like the face of a travel alarm.  Takes a minute before it dawns on me what it is.

"Turn," I say.  So she's got somebody.  "There's a little swelling--"  I look closer.  Or who knows; maybe she just likes to stay on the safe side.  A few drops of water fall from her hair and slide past my fingers into the top of her suit.  "Looks like there might be something in there.  In the middle."  I straighten.  "Maybe you should have this checked out." 

She turns her head to look at me, concerned.

"Hey, relax."  The tension in her shoulders is obvious.  I set my hand over her right shoulder, smoothing my thumb along the side of her neck.  Marita bristles--or is that a shiver?--and gives me a look.  "Relax," I say.  "You're all knotted up.  You said yourself how important it is to stay healthy."  I can't do the same thing on the other side, but I do what I can manage.  She seems to loosen, though I can't say the same for myself.  "There's bound to be a hospital around, or someplace you can have it checked out.  How well do you know this town?"

"Well enough," she says, and pauses.  "You can stop now."

I let go and take a step back.

"There's a hospital two kilometers away," she says, then turns and looks up.  "Will you go with me?"

Yet another surprise.  "Uh, yeah.  Sure."

It's past eight as the cab winds its way through the city, taking us to the hospital.  Friday night and the streets are full of people, lit signs glowing above restaurants and the beat of music pouring out through the open doors of discos.  I glance over at Marita, colors from the lights and signs passing across her face. 

"You okay?" I ask.  She looks worried, or... smaller somehow, not as formidable as the hard-edged woman who's drilled me on the intricacies of a Plan that aims to save the species from extinction.

She nods, but looks away, out the window again.

At the hospital I let myself blend into the background after they take Marita off to an examining room.  The little bit of Spanish I picked up years ago has faded away for the most part, but I listen to the people around me, picking out a few familiar words here and there.

About twenty minutes later she comes back.  Turns out she was stung by something.  They've taken out the stinger, cleaned the wound; she's fine, ready to go.  Still, there's something quiet and subdued about her, the usual sharp edges missing.  Which isn't like her.  We ride back to the apartment without speaking.

Who knows what's on her mind, but she doesn't seem inclined to share.  It's early, barely 9:30, but she decides to turn in.  I shower and hit the sack again, too, and lie there thinking about the island I was on a week ago, so quiet and peaceful, the world with its nightmare future locked away beyond the foggy haze that sat offshore. 

Eventually I fall asleep, but I wake up again about 2 a.m.  The room's too hot.  I leave the door wide open to get a cross draft going and head outside, where I stretch out on the chaise lounge.  It's cooled off a little and there's a slight breeze that seems to be picking up, which comes as a relief. 

What if it had been something poisonous that bit her?  She's mentioned that before--something crazy happening out of the blue that could end up interfering with our work on this plan.  The thing is, she could keep going if I were sidelined, but the same's not true in reverse: without her, this whole operation would be history.

I swallow, glance over toward the inside in time to see her coming through the door.  She's got that thin robe on again. 

"Slept enough?" I say.  "Or is it just too hot in your room?"

"A little of each," she says, coming closer.  She sits down in the chair next to mine.

"It's getting cooler, at least."  I look up overhead to where gray clouds are doing a forced march across the sky.  "Smells like it might rain."

"Yes."  After a beat she looks skyward, too, showing off a fine curve of smooth, white neck.

I rub my thumb along the armrest under my hand.  "Guess I never give much thought to how... separate we are from the rest of the world," I say.  "But last night, you know, on the way to the hospital...  It was like being inside a bottle, watching the world go by."  I pull up a little.  "You ever think about that?" 

She raises an eyebrow, as if she's surprised I'm capable of higher thought.  Her expression softens.  "Sometimes.  No one else could understand what this is like."

For a long time we sit there without saying anything.

Eventually the silence starts to eat at me.  "So tell me about art," I say.  "Miguel said you wanted to be an art dealer."

She shrugs.  "There are beautiful things out there.  Interesting things.  Ways of interpreting the world."  She pauses and I wait for that trademark 'ah' that marks her formal self, but it doesn't come.  "But I knew I'd need to make a living, too.  I wasn't going to be dependent on someone else the way my mother always has been."

"She and your dad split?"

"They were too different.  He was an idealist; he'd feed every beggar who knocked on our back door."

"And your mom?"

"She knew what she wanted.  Knows.  But the only way she sees to get it is through men.  They're her passport."

"And you want your own."

"Don't you?"  Marita crosses one long leg over the other.

"Hell, yeah."  I pause.  "So you decided to sell art instead of just look at it, or collect it."

"Yes."

"You ever miss having that chance?"

"What good would it have done to do that instead of this?"

I shrug.  "Point taken."  I try not to concentrate too hard on all that leg showing between the folds of her robe.

"Your turn," she says.  "What kind of plans did you have?"  And she sounds like she might actually be interested.

Plans.  Right. 

I glance over at her; it's obvious she's not going to let me off the hook this time.  I let out a long breath.

"The truth, Alex," she says, drilling me with the one eye I can see from here.  "Without a foundation of trust this isn't going to work.  What would you think if you found out I'd lied about any of what I've told you?"  An eyebrow goes up.  "From what I know about Russian orphanages, boys who grow up in them don't end up where you are.  Not even by chance."

"It wasn't an orphanage," I say.  "Okay, it was an institution, but not as bad as that."  I stop to take a breath.  "Not exactly, anyway."

"So what  _was_  it like?"  She sits up, uncrosses her legs and crosses them the other way.

"It was a place for... for inconvenient kids, embarrassments--ones who would get in the way of careers, or alliances."  I can feel my mouth tighten.  Damn if I want to get into this.

"And you got there how?"

I let my head drop against the back of the chaise and look up into the lightening sky.  My hand curls tight.  "Like everybody else.  I was an inconvenience."

She could push me further but she waits.  Something knots inside me.  I can't bring myself to say it, and anyway, what business is it of hers?  She wasn't a mistake--trash--or a convenient mule to help carry someone else to their chosen destination.  I picture the kids I grew up with: ragged, skinny, hungry for something they couldn't put a name to.

"His--Spender's."  The words burst out of me almost before I realize they're there.  "Not a party boss's or some colonel's."  I sniff back the moisture in my nose.  "He took me there as an infant."  And I'm out of the chair and on my way inside, leaving the door half-open.

I pace through the living room, then go down the hall to the bathroom, take a piss and go back to my room.  I loop around the end of the bed, sit down on the edge facing the window and let my head drop into my hand.  Nice show, Aleksei.  Real smooth. 

After a few seconds my brain catches up and Marita's reaction to my little revelation filters in: shocked horror.  Who knows where this will leave us.  I get up, reach for the bottle that's been sitting on the dresser since I arrived and down a couple of swigs, then a third for good measure, and set it back on the dresser top.  Or at least I mean to, but it falls over and spills.  Swearing, I snatch it up, grab yesterday's T-shirt off the floor, swipe it across the wood and then stomp it against the carpet to soak up what's gone over the edge. 

Then I sprawl out on the bed, wishing the world would go away.  The house is completely quiet and eventually I drift toward fitful sleep.

But I wake up after an hour or so, thirsty as hell.  The light's still on in the living room, which strikes me as odd given that it's four in the morning.

Tossing off the sheet that's over me, I take a minute to let myself cool off, focus on fine-tuning my ears and eyes.  What a fucking stupid thing--taking off like that. 

I stand up, take a deep breath, start down the hallway to the kitchen... and find Marita on the couch, head back against the cushions, a washcloth across her forehead.  The robe's been swapped for shorts and a sleeveless top with tiny blue flowers on them--lounging stuff, I guess.

I stand there for a few seconds.  Finally clear my throat.  "You okay?"

"Hot," she says. 

"There's the pool."  I nod toward the patio. 

She shakes her head.  "I've been thinking." 

"About?"

"What you said."

"Mm."

She sits up and turns toward me now.  "What if allying with him for some reason made sense?"

"What?"

"What would you do?"

I frown.  "Anything but."

"Why?"

"What the-- Why the hell would you even ask that?  Because he's poison, Marita."

"He's your father, Alex."

"What, and I'm going to have some kind of inbred loyalty toward the pathetic fucker who dumped me in that hellhole, figuring it'd help toughen me up if I happened to survive?"  I pause and push out a breath.  "What kind of loyalty would you feel?"

Her mouth opens; frown lines ridge her forehead.  Finally she shakes her head.  There's nothing adversarial in her look now.  Maybe something more like sympathy.  "I have no point of reference for that."

"Then you're lucky," I say, my voice quieter than I expected it would be.  How could she have any idea, with the kind of father she had?  After a couple of beats I turn and start for the kitchen.  "You want water or something?"

"Yes.  Thank you." 

I grab two bottles and go back to the couch.  When I hand her one, she rolls it across her forehead.  I'm not used to seeing her with her hair smoothed flat, like for once she's not ready for a photo shoot.  And those legs go on forever.

"So how's the wound?"  

"It seems alright."  She twists the cap off her bottle of water and takes a drink.

"You sure you're okay?" I say, and sit down.  She looks tired.  "Transparency, remember?  That 'foundation of trust' you were all for earlier." 

"I have a mild headache."

"Maybe from something they gave you?"

"Possibly."

Or it could be from the little bomb I dropped, from worrying if it would change anything--whether I might be tempted to spill the secret of her hard-won vaccine program to Daddy Dearest; maybe that's where she's headed with this.  The thought of handing the old man anything makes me knot up inside.

"If he were the last man on this whole fucking planet, I wouldn't go to him," I say.  "Just for the record."

Marita looks pained--for me, as far as I can tell.  Then she eases herself back against the cushions and pauses.  Her expression changes.  "In the interest of openness..."

I raise one eyebrow.

"There's still a risk from the bite, from what they say."

"What kind of risk?"

"A possibility of"--her nose wrinkles in distaste--"eggs in the wound."  Her lips press together briefly.  "An off-chance, but still."

"So, what exactly does that mean?"

Marita's mouth tightens, but she forces it to relax.  She's trying for her usual in-control delivery but she looks a little pale, to tell the truth.  "They asked if there were flowers in the area, and if I'd noticed any flies afterwards--if I'd brushed any off the wound."

"Did you?"

"Not that I recall.  But there are five big pots of flowers out there.  Evidently screwworm flies have been active in this area recently.  They're attracted to flowers.  And open wounds."

I swallow.  "So they're talking about this fly laying eggs in the wound after the fact."

She nods.

Which means maggots, and other things I don't want to begin to picture--especially not on a fine specimen of womanhood like Marita.

"If the wound is clearly healing by morning rather than getting worse, then it should be fine."

I lean back against the cushions and close my eyes briefly.  Shit.  Here it is: one of those unforeseen possibilities that could leave Marita incapacitated, or worse, and threaten this whole program.

"They did say it was an outside chance," she adds.

I glance over at her--she's staring into nothing--but in spite of her words, she looks worried.  Or maybe just drained.  Without thinking I reach out, cover her hand with mine and brush my thumb across her knuckles.  Then, realizing what I've done, I move it away as smoothly as I can and sit up, my heart suddenly beating a little too fast.  

"I should sleep," she says, turning her head toward me but not giving away any reaction to what I just did.  "If I could just stop thinking.  That place you went to get away--would you mind describing it?"

Didn't see that coming.  I shrug.  "Blue sea," I start, clearing my throat.  Marita closes her eyes.  "Silver, when the sun shines on it.  One line after another of mountains on the horizon, each paler than the next, and just this little place coming closer, rising out of the water."  My eyes scan her lips, her cheekbones, the way that pale blonde hair drapes to one side, exposing her neck and collarbone.  "Woods down to the shoreline in some places; little cabins tucked away here and there.  Deer."  I think about taking her hand again, but decide I'd better play it safe.  "A bay where orcas breech."  Settling back against the cushions, I look up at the ceiling and picture myself there.  "Good fishing.  Quiet." 

 

**Saturday  
Cali, Colombia**

Eventually I come awake to my name being called.  Dull light's coming in the window of my room, along with the sounds and smells of rain.

"Alex?"

I blink and turn to see Marita standing in the half-open doorway.

"Hm?"

She takes a few steps forward. "Would you check this?"  Her voice is soft.  Her robe sits off one shoulder.  "I can't see it clearly enough myself."

The bite.  Tension starts to hum inside me. 

I stretch and work to blink the dryness out of my eyes.  I'm a lot groggier than I realized.  I glance up.  Marita's hair is messy, but in a nice sort of way; she's got this soft-around-the-edges look.

"Around," I say, motioning for her to come around to the other side of the bed.  "Can't help you on this side."  And I lift the stump to prove it. 

She comes around and sits carefully on the edge of the mattress, and I pull up to a sitting position behind her.  Like a window shade in reverse, the robe is slowly let down to her waist.  Underneath it she's wearing a thin, soft pink undershirt with a little lace border around the neck edge.  I swallow.  Am I supposed to...?  But she's waiting, so I take a finger and carefully pull the armhole edge of the shirt aside.  Parts of me are waking up fast, and I wonder how much of her request is practicality, how much may be something else. 

"Looks... seems okay.  Like it's starting to heal over," I say, squinting at the place to make sure I'm not missing anything.  "Kind of a reddish pink, but nothing that looks like it's getting worse."

She sighs--deep sigh--and her shoulders drop in relief.  

"Hey, relax."  I let the shirt go and run my hand down her arm.  "Did you sleep?"

"For a while."  She starts to move her arm, as if she's going to shake me off, but stops.  I swallow.  Suddenly the room is silent except for the sounds of breathing.  A couple of beats and I send my hand skimming back up her arm to her shoulder.  My thumb brushes the side of her neck.

"What are you doing?" she says, half turning.  My hand gets bumped and lands beside her waist.

"You're wound tighter than a watch spring, Marita.  The tension's not going to do you any good."

"I know how to relax."

"What, the way you were relaxing at four this morning?  Yeah, you've got it all figured out."  My hand tightens against her waist. 

A shiver runs through her and her hand closes over mine, pinning it in place.  But she doesn't shove it away.  And Junior's awake now and not at all likely to lie down quietly like a good boy.  "You think you can do it all on your own, Marita.  Well, maybe you shouldn't.  Maybe you don't have to anymore."

Still she doesn't push me away.  Her hand's a patch of heat over mine.

My breathing is shallow.  "You know, you need to loosen up, let go a little," I say, swallowing around the words.  Every cell in my body is awake now.  I can smell the soap scent on her, almost feel parts of her I'm not touching. 

"I can't afford to, Alex."

"Maybe you can't afford not to." 

My thumb moves slightly, sliding up under the edge of her shirt.  I feel the in-and-out of her breathing against my palm and fingers.  Hoping I won't blow it, I let my thumb brush the softness there.  Her breath catches.  But no protest.  Carefully I slip my hand around front to settle against her belly.  And now it's pretty obvious that I'm not the only one feeling what I do.

"Relax," I whisper, catching her left shoulder with my chin and coaxing her back against my chest.  I nip at the side of her neck and my hand goes exploring, slow and easy: smooth belly, gradually up to the warm fullness of a breast--her breathing quickens--and then the other, a hard little knot buried deep against the roundness in my palm.  I count to ten, remind myself I need to take it slow, make her want this as much as I do.

And she's getting there, her breathing faster and shallow, a whimper rising in her throat.  Her head turns, her lips catching mine.  "Want more?" I ask into her open mouth, two fingers resting under the elastic of her waistband.  

She nods, flushed.

"Meet me in the pool."

And she does.  It's not that I've got such exotic tastes; it's pure practicality.  The default position would be awkward as hell with the arm gone, and I don't want to spend time fumbling around like an amateur.  But in the water... Let's just say that standing chest-deep in the pool, Marita with her arms and legs wrapped around me, rain pouring down on us, is something I'm going to remember for a very long time.

Things don't take long to develop, need and contact swirling everything into a blur of sensation.  When it's over I just stand there panting against her, high as a kite, feeling the imprint of that smooth, amazing flesh against me.  I rub my nose against her shoulder.

"You know, you're gorgeous when you give up," I whisper, grinning like an idiot around the words.

Her head comes up; she looks as dopey as I do but her expression quickly changes.  "What if I told you I have videotape of this whole thing?" she says, her voice dropping to that low challenge she does so well.

Panic shoots through me and my mouth falls open.  She just looks at me and breaks out laughing.

"What--?" 

She leans back, still laughing.  I could let go of her, let her go under, but all I see is that pale, smooth neck.  I catch a bit of it between my teeth.  "You'd better be joking."

Her head comes up.  "I don't film," she says.  "I also don't 'give up'."  She reaches between us and grabs something sensitive.

"Got it," I say, squirming, and she lets go.

At this point my biggest wish would be to fall asleep without having to move another muscle.  But no such luck given where I am.  We detach, I kiss her, then turn back and kiss her again.

"You looked wiped out, Alex," she says.  The tone's a mock put-down but she's grinning, her cheeks are flushed, and anyway, it's true.  The rain has turned to a sprinkle and I climb out and stretch out on the chaise lounge.  "What about you?" I say.

"I think I'm going to swim for a while," she says, and I turn my head to watch as she starts.  The worry's dogged me ever since I lost the arm: that I'd never get laid again, that no woman was ever going to want me like this.  The moment comes flooding back, the two of us lost in the intensity of it, and I grin in spite of myself.  My guess is that Marita doesn't go around giving it away, either.  Though it seems she definitely needed it.  Make that two of us.  

I reach down to rearrange things; Junior's fallen asleep and not long afterward, I follow.  I dream of being on the island again.  It's late spring; low-hanging mist is breaking up to show bits of blue sky overhead, and wildflowers carpet the meadows as I start up the trail leading toward the mountain.

When Marita wakes me on her way out of the pool, I'm groggy as anything and soaked; the rain is coming down hard.  Inside again, I manage to dry off; then I crawl into bed and drift off almost immediately.

~*~*~*~

When I come around, the smell of toast is drifting in from the kitchen.  I blink and try to clear my head.  The clock on the little table beside the bed says 9:30.  And again, I've been sweating onto the sheets.

"So you've slept it off?"

I glance up to see Marita, arms crossed, leaning against the door frame.  She's got a different shirt on this time--peachy colored--and a pair of khaki shorts.  The heat here never seems to quit.

"Who, me?"  Afterward can be awkward; you never know quite where you're going to stand with a woman.  "Does it ever cool down around here?"

"It's the equator, Alex.  You're out of luck."

"Is it this bad where you come from?"

"No, thank goodness.  It stays warm, but it's not this extreme.  Or this humid."  She pauses.  "Are you hungry?"

"Yeah.  Starving."

She's gotten together some fresh bread from a little place down the street, and some cheese and local fruits, most of them kinds I've never seen before.  We sit eating in the kitchen, not really touching on what happened earlier.

"I talked to Seňor Carranza downstairs," she says.  "He's promised to have a portable air conditioner sent up by this afternoon."

My hand stops halfway to my mouth.  This will be interesting.  "Great."  We'll be able to cool one room.  It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.  Or where it leads.

"I'd take you around, show you the town, Alex, but I'm still jet-lagged."

"No problem.  Same here.  By the time you start to come out of it, it's time to leave again."  I pause, watch her.  "'S going to be rough for you on Monday."

There's this momentary pause from her, as if the fact that I've thought about what will happen to her touches some sensitive place. 

"You're lucky you don't have to be anywhere," she says.  "A job, I mean," she adds, realizing that I might actually have a schedule. 

"Been meaning to let you know," I say between bites.  "The first of November I'll be gone for a week getting the arm retooled.  The prosthesis, not this."  I nod toward the stump.  "Thing shrinks and you've got to refit."  Pain in the ass, but there's nothing to be done about it.  "I scheduled it so I'd be back on track before our second distribution comes up."

"I appreciate you letting me know."  She's pushing a chunk of cherimoya around her plate with a fork but doesn't pick it up.

"You have any vacation time?" I ask.  "A chance you can get away--you know, somewhere close with no jet lag involved--and just relax for a week or so?  It'd do you good."

"Do I look that run down?"  The sardonic smile again, but I can tell it's only a front this time. 

"You're fine."  I pause.  "Okay, better than fine."  I flash a smile.  She's gorgeous, actually, though there's no point in letting it go to her head.  "But you need a break.  I'm in this, too; I know the signs."  I stop to pick up a little yellow fruit about the size of a marble and pinch the papery covering off between my fingers.  "Anything can happen.  You want something you can look back on for the time you've spent on this rock, even if it's just climbing a mountain and getting a good view of a sunrise over the water."  I shrug.

"Aren't you the philosopher this morning," she says, picking up her coffee cup and cradling it just below her lips.

I ignore the tone in her voice and raise an eyebrow.  "Maybe I was inspired." 

She smiles at that.

"Think about it," I say.

~*~*~*~

So that's how the time goes: a little sleep, a little intersection where we talk for a while and then go our separate ways.  I'm starting to get cabin fever, but I don't know the area.  There's always the outside possibility of being spotted if we go out, and anyway, neither of us really has the energy.  Neither of us goes in the pool, either, as if it might look like we're trying to start something.  Though more of what went on before would be okay by me, and my guess is I'm not alone in that; it would just take getting past this awkwardness.

About 11 o'clock the doorbell rings; they've brought the air conditioner.  Because of the way it's set up, the only place it's going to work is in one of the windows in the living room.  After they get it working we sit around for a while, talking through our first distribution of the vaccine.  We've got high hopes, and a lot of planning has gone into contingencies for how this might play out, but we can't kid ourselves about the considerable risks of what we'll be attempting.  The success of the plan depends on nobody finding out who we are and what we're up to; any adverse publicity could expose us and kill this project.  If the old men find out, Marita and I are likely to end up dead along with it.

Our strategy's already mapped out: D.C. and New York will be write-offs, the first places we figure any alien attacks are likely to strike, so we're not wasting our vaccine there.  The initial doses will go to military at Wright-Patterson in Ohio (ironically, one of the sites where the Roswell UFOs were deconstructed), the naval training center north of Chicago, and scientists and university students in what we hope will be secure areas--Boston, Toronto, Rochester--to protect people who could conceivably be our first line of defense in combating the invasion.  The northeast will be our starting point, with the greatest number of potential facilities for research and defense, along with colder temperatures that are more likely to inhibit the oil.  And we'll fan out from there.  As far as we can go, and as many countries.  For as long as we're able.

Between the thoughts of invasion and the hour, though, we eventually reach a point when all we want is to get away, find something to eat, swap out the walls of the apartment for different scenery.  We go down the street, find a little café and have some lunch, then take a cab to the university and wander around the huge, shady 'green zones' for a while.

The longer we're out, the quieter I get.  Marita's enjoying the lake in the middle of the campus, but all I can think about is how many things can go wrong with the distribution: aftereffects of the injections leading people to question the contents or quality of their 'flu shot' or whatever we'll be telling them it is; questions from people administering it; maybe a chance discovery of a batch of some vaccine that's being dumped to make way for ours.  The more you explore the possibilities, the more you wonder what the hell makes you think this will ever work.

Two little boys run past me, laughing, and I pull myself back to the moment.  Marita's on the other end of the bench, looking out at the water.  On the benches around us families share food they've brought in bags and baskets.  A normal childhood, she said.  Which meant family, friends: attachments, and consequences of those attachments, that I probably can't even begin to comprehend.

"You ever go home?" I ask, looking to break the silence.

She squints over at me, opens her mouth but no words follow.  She shakes her head.  "It's difficult," she says finally.  "It's tiring to lie, to make up a life and be on alert so you won't slip up."

"Yeah." I nod.  "Your mother's there, isn't she?"

"Yes.  Unfortunately we don't have that much in common."  She looks out into the water.  "She wanted a different life for me.  In her mind I was supposed be a well-to-do wife, the kind of elegant woman who gets written up on the society page.  And who would give her grandchildren.  A boy and a girl, of course."  She smiles, but it turns sour.  Or painful.  Hard to tell.

She looks away again and I study her hairline, little beads of sweat forming along it, and the curve of neck and shoulder.  Her hair's pulled back loosely and tied with some kind of ribbon.

"I'm ready to go," she says, turning to me.  "How about you?"

I nod.  We get up and start back to where we can find a taxi.  "Living room should be cool by now," I say, and we walk the rest of the way to the main square without speaking.

~*~*~*~

Back in the apartment I'm restless.  It hits me that I've really slipped if I've taken this place for granted and not even bothered to check for bugs.  Not that I assume Marita's placed any, though it's possible, and it's best never to assume anything.  But there's always the chance that the old men have been keeping an eye on her from a distance without her realizing.  During Soviet times, it was the people who never seemed to be under surveillance that they gleaned the most intel from.  If you couldn't spot your designated spy following you, you should've realized something was wrong.  But people would relax, and that was their downfall.

I check my room first: under the bed, the dresser, the lamps.  I feel for wires leading to light switches and outlets, but I don't find anything.  I'm taking a look inside the air conditioning unit when Marita comes out of her room and spots me.

"What are you doing?"  She scowls.  One hand goes to her hip.

"Checking this thing," I say.

"But it was working fine."

"For bugs."

She isn't sure what to make of me now.

"I've known Don Carlos for--" 

"I'm not saying your friend's trying to sell you out.  The old men."

Her mouth opens.  She lets out a sigh and drops into the nearest chair.

"Haven't found anything, though," I say.  "Not in the rest of the house, either, if it makes you feel any better.  But they play hardball, Marita, and they'll play it with you if they find out."  I pause and frown.  "Could you, uh, give me a hand with this panel?  I managed to get it off, but--" 

But lifting it into place again with only one good hand--not even close.  She comes over, squats down beside me and holds the panel in place while I screw the cover on again.  I can smell the lemon-scented shampoo from the bathroom on her hair.  I'd like to think the close quarters would make for a nice transition into something a little more personal, but I can tell this isn't the time.  After we get the thing running again, we each claim one of the sofas on either side of the coffee table.

"You know, anything can happen," I say.  "Like that bug bite--weird, unexpected things you'd never imagine.  Look, I realize you've got reasons for having your double security with FarmaCol, but if something happened to you, this plan would be finished.  Kaput."

"And you're suggesting?"

"That you set it up so that I could get that code if I needed it."

"Alex, I don't even know you."

Her words hit me like a slap in the face.  I push up off the couch and stand.  "What?  But you knew a stranger well enough to fuck him in that pool out there?"

She shoots me a kill look.  "You know what I mean.  I've spent the last six years working on this; my father gave up his life for it.  I'm not giving it away--not to any man.  Not even to one who comes along offering to help make it work." 

"You recruited  _me_.  I brought you the vaccine, Marita.  Without it, your plan would be nothing more than a pipe dream right now."

The corner of her mouth twitches and the flinty gray in her eyes begins to soften.  "I know.  I realize we wouldn't be here without what you've brought to this.  But realistically, Alex, if our places were reversed, would you give me the code if it were your plan?"

I push out a breath, run a hand back though my hair. "Probably not.  But that still doesn't change the situation.  If something happened to you, we'd be up Shit Creek.  How would that help the goal you've worked for all these years?"

"I'll think about it, Alex.  But for now, I don't know you well enough for that.  Not yet."

"Well, I'm not going to sit here and pour out my whole life story for you to pick through until you find whatever it is you're looking for."  I pause.  "And I'm not naïve enough to think you're going to do the same for me, either."

And I turn and go to my room.  At the moment I could really use one of those confrontations with Mulder.  He could punch me and I could pound him back until we'd both had enough, and then we could set it aside and move on.

But my hands are tied here.  Hand.  She's a woman--an arrogant woman with a sharp set of fangs.  Beyond that, she holds all the cards.  Pressing her feet to the fire, even if there were a way to do it, would only make her pull away from this... 'joint venture', this not-quite-partnership, forced marriage--whatever the hell you want to call it.  I should be so lucky.

The problem is, I am; the fact that her plan and my ability to get the vaccine intersected is nothing short of a miracle.  Which means for now I'm going to have to put up and shut up.  Instead of being the old man's bitch, I end up as Marita's bitch.

Not for any longer than I have to, though.  I toss a pillow off the bed, roll toward the wall and not long afterward fall into a fitful sleep. 

~*~*~*~

"Alex--"

I open my eyes.  The sky is overcast and darkening; I don't see raindrops but I can smell them.  Marita's squatted beside the bed.

"Truce?" she says.  She's got that soft-around-the-edges look again, and a voice to go with it.

I frown at her.  "You're the one firing the big guns."

"I know."  She pauses.  "And I realize it's not the ideal way to run a collaboration.  But you probably know what it feels like when the world wants to take what you've worked so hard to get.  You clutch it close to you."

"Mm."  I raise an eyebrow.  "Usually for good reason."

"Exactly."  She stands. 

I pull up.  "Too hot in here."

"It's cool in the living room."

So I follow her out there.

But she surprises me and doesn't sit on either of the couches; she settles on the floor on her side, propped up on one elbow.  I take her cue, sit in front of the couch and lean back against it.

"What time do we leave in the morning?" I say.

"Five-thirty.  The vaccine should be ready to load when we arrive."

I'm not looking forward to another dozen hours in the air, but it's not like anybody's giving me a choice.

"You know, there's nothing going to make me sabotage this plan," I say.  "Believe it or not I've been dealing with this--thinking about it"--I glance up at the ceiling--"having nightmares about it"--and refocus on her--"longer than you have.  Since I was a kid."

She gives me a curious look.

"I was"--I push out a breath--"eleven the first time he took me to the place where they were doing the research."

"Why?"  She seems pained by that, and she hasn't even heard the story yet.

"He wanted me to see the Oil--what it was, what it did.  So I'd know what my life work was: to fight that.  Or to fight it for him, to be on the inside, give him a leg up on what was going on."

Now she really looks horrified. 

"Wasn't any picnic."  I pull up, turn around and lie down on my back, though my head ends up a little closer to Marita's than I'd figured on.  I stare at the light fixture on the ceiling, kind of a grooved, pumpkin-shaped thing.

"He took you to Russia so you could grow up to be a mole for the vaccine program?"

"That and whatever else he wanted done.  Until he decided I was more trouble than I was worth."

"The story in the board room was that you'd been killed in a car accident."

"Yeah, well, he would've liked it that way.  No accident, though.  Just luck that I managed to get out before it blew sky high."  I count the grooves in the amber glass above me.  "I ran like hell."

"And sold the secrets on the DAT tape which you then used to finance the Russian research."

"When the opportunity came up, yeah.  Good thing I'm not a big spender, didn't fritter the money away."

"And in between?"

I shrug, but inside I get that inevitable knot in my stomach.  "That's the other thing," I say.  "This thing with the Oil--it's personal with me."  I take a few deep breaths, try to make sure the memories aren't sneaking out from some dark corner of my head to set up their usual ambush.  I glance over at Marita.  She's waiting, eager.

"It got into me once.  Jumped to me from somebody else it was traveling in."  I look up again, count the seven grooves once, twice... In my mind's eye I can see the old man looking through me, talking right to the Oil.  He'd been expecting it.  And that little smirk of his, knowing where the Oil would take me. 

Where it would leave me.

I glance over at Marita.  She's on her stomach now, propped up on her elbows.  There's this look in her eyes; she wants to know what it was like, but she doesn't want to know.  Definitely isn't going to ask.

"You don't want to know," I say, and the dryness in my voice warns me that I need to get a grip.

Her head goes down; blonde hair spills around her face.  After a moment she rolls onto her back and looks up.

"Light fixture's pretty interesting," I say, twisting my head to look at her.  It takes her a few seconds to realize it's a joke.  She smiles briefly and then looks up again.

"For years I've blamed Spender... for all of this," she says.  "For the way my father's spirit was broken, for what my life has become.  For everything I've had to leave behind."  She turns to look at me.  "It's true what they say, though... about everything being relative.  I can't imagine--"  She frowns.

A moment later she rolls toward me; her hand smooths across my cheek and settles along my jaw bone. 

"What, so now you feel sorry for me?"

She puts a finger on my lips.  "Not everything anyone offers you is a lie, or a trick."

I take her hand, look up at the ceiling, let my thumb brush across her fingers.  "We'll make him pay," I say, and feel her grip tighten against mine.  "In the end we'll make the son of a bitch pay."

~*~*~*~

You can probably guess where things go from there.  Doing it in the pool was a lot easier, and much as I'd rather be on top, I settle for what I can manage.  Parts of it are awkward as hell, but that's probably more my ego screaming than anything else; Marita seems to be enjoying herself, and what I'm getting, I have to admit, is pretty damn good.  We wear ourselves out in her room, then take showers, snack on what's left in the fridge and end up in the living room again, where Marita's laid out the cushions from both couches on the floor together.  By then it's nearly ten, and we need to get what sleep we can before we get up early and head to the airport.

For a while I lie there beside her staring up at the shadow patterns on the ceiling, thinking about the woman who shows through when all the layers are peeled away, and about Miguel Ansbach's warning to be careful with her.  I have to laugh now at how naïve I'd been at the time.  Me, sleep with this woman? 

Eventually I notice she's looking at me.

"What, still awake?" I say.

"Thinking," she says, and lets out a little sigh.

"You do that too much, you know.  Bad for your health."  And I catch her shoulder between my teeth, hold on carefully and then kiss the place.  "You're like that poem of Akhmatova's."

"Which one?"

"'I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies'," I start, and then repeat the line in Russian, where it sounds more real.

She nods.

"'We do not flinch from anything'.  Sound like anybody you know?  Huh?"

She rolls her eyes, but when I reach over and pull her close, she curls her head down below my chin and an arm slips around my waist.  "Superheroes only exist in comic books, Marita.  You need to take care of yourself."

And that's the way we fall asleep.  After midnight I wake up to find the blanket down around my waist.  Marita's curled on her side, her back to me.  I pull the blanket up over us and listen to her breathing, but it's not shallow enough for her to be asleep.  Carefully I roll toward her and pull up slightly, brushing the hair back from her face.  She closes her eyes when she notices me looking, but I've seen them already, shiny and full, close to spilling. 

'We are the people without tears'--another line from the same poem.  But I don't say anything; she didn't want me to notice in the first place.  Instead I slip my arm around her, breathe into the small space between her neck and shoulder and work my way back toward sleep. 

 

**Sunday  
Cali, Colombia**

At four we get up, pack and go to the airport.  Just like Marita said, the boxes are there waiting when we arrive.  We go through each one, making sure all the vaccine is there, and load it onto the plane.  Twelve hours later we're descending into New York to drop Marita off; after that, I'll continue on to oversee drops at distribution points in Boston and Ohio, then head to Toronto with the last of the shipment.

As the plane descends, Marita puts on her game face; actually, she's been gradually putting on her public self for the last couple of hours, ever since she woke up.  I stay out of her way and don't try to start anything; after all, our success depends on her ability to be on top of what she does, to wear the façade and juggle all the details.  I hate feeling helpless, but until I can work myself deeper into this plan, I'm just going to have to suck it up.  Besides, I have a whole list of things I need to take care of for this vaccine distribution before it starts.

The wheels touch down on the runway with a sharp screech and the pressure of deceleration pushes us back into our seats.  Across the aisle from me, Marita grimaces momentarily, but forces a smile when she sees me looking.  The co-pilot opens the door to the cockpit and tells us it'll be about two minutes until we're parked.  Marita reaches for her bag, pulls out a pad of paper and a pen and starts jotting notes.  I wonder where the woman I saw this weekend has gone.  And when--or if--I'll see her again.  Beyond the windows, New York is settling into evening, the last light of day painting the horizon in a strip of glowing pinks and oranges.

When she stands up, I stand, too.  The door to the cockpit is open and she's obviously aware of that fact. 

"Have a safe trip home," I say. 

She smiles briefly, shouldering her bag.  "Thank you for your help, Mr. Jameson.  It was very much appreciated.  Call me from Toronto and let me know how your flight was."

"Sure thing." 

Awkwardly I hold out my hand.  She takes it, pumps it once, then with a glance toward the cockpit, she brushes a kiss against my cheek.

A moment later she's out the door and going down the stairway.  I watch until she disappears into the terminal, navy coat floating out behind her, then turn back to the plane interior, switch on my overhead reading light and pull out my checklist for the Ohio drop. 

"Would you like to try an appetizer while you're waiting, sir?"

I look up to find the co-pilot standing beside me, a fancy tray of fruit and cheese in one hand.

"Yeah, thanks."

He sets it down in front of me.  "Dinner will be served as soon as we're airborne," he says, and then turns and leaves.

I pick up a thin little fork, poke it into a chunk of melon and picture Marita in the Cali apartment, pushing a piece of fruit around her plate.  Then Marita sitting on the edge of the bed in that soft little pink shirt.  Closing my eyes, I lean back into the seat and hold that thought.

\--------------------------

NARRATIVE D

_Vaccine distribution, complications and unexpected good news_

 

As Marita and I were flying to New York with our first 12,000 doses of precious vaccine, I kept thinking about how much things had changed in the previous couple of days--not just because we'd had a few rolls in the hay, but because I'd learned a lot more about her.  She seemed more human and less intimidating than before, and frankly, what she'd accomplished was pretty damned impressive.  As for the things I'd let out, well, those were secrets I wasn't going to have to keep anymore, lies I wouldn't have to keep track of.  Besides, it was a relief to come across somebody else who understood the colonization nightmares, the constant worry that any one of a handful of enemies might be on to you, or the way your gut tightens when you look up at the night sky.  No illusion about pretty stars when you know what's coming.

The vaccine pick-up was just the start of things, though.  Our next hurdle was to see that it actually got into people.  I stayed with the plane after Marita left, overseeing drops in Boston, Ohio and at the Naval Training Center on Lake Michigan.  After that, the last doses went with me to Toronto, where I was to watch over the inoculations at the massive CamGen research campus there and report any problems.  It was a week of apprehension served with a side of fear as I snooped around CamGen's health center, watching all their researchers--future fighters in an unearthly war they had yet to find out about--line up for the needle, and waiting to see how many reactions we'd get, how bad they'd turn out to be, and whether they'd throw up any one of half a dozen red flags that had the potential to expose us.  All of a sudden the whole plan seemed a lot like walking into a den of lions.

There were dozens of injection site reactions bad enough to send people back worried or complaining.  For the most part the doctors didn't seem overly worried, though there was talk of contacting the manufacturer about the batch.  Marita had that covered, too, with contact numbers printed right on the vaccine vials... which went to one of her people, of course.  It would hold us as long as nobody thought to contact the manufacturer through an actual corporate phone number.  In any event, I can't say I slept well, and by the end of the week when I messaged her asking if she wanted to meet and compare notes, she replied with a time and the name of a deli in Brooklyn.  So I booked a flight and took off for New York, wondering how things would play out this time.

What I was hoping for was a chance at the vaccine retrieval code; Marita had things set up so any pick-up required her approval before the shipment would be released.  It'd made sense when she didn't know me that well, but in the long run it was going to be dangerous: if anything happened to her, our distribution would be dead in the water, vaccine piling up in a Cali warehouse and no way to access it.  We'd gone around about the access code in Cali, but she hadn't been about to give it to me then.  So that was definitely on my mind, along with the hope that we could pick up where we'd left off the last time on the personal end of things.

But if I'd been thinking I'd get lucky again, I was obviously in for disappointment.  We made contact at the deli and I followed Marita to an older fourth-floor walkup that turned out to be a secret second place she kept.  Small and basic--definitely not her Upper West Side apartment--but probably a much more secure place for us to meet away from prying eyes.  But as soon as she'd gotten me settled and we'd finished our initial intel swap, she took off for some party she claimed she had to show up for at the British Embassy.  Didn't even say she'd be back, just promised to connect with me the next day.  Which left me alone, thanks a lot, to amuse myself for the evening.  Okay, I probably wouldn't have made very good company anyway.  I was already in the mood to bite something after the tension of the week in Toronto.  I thought seriously about taking off--just flying on to D.C.  Why should I bother to hang around here by myself?  But I knew by then what a private person Marita was, and the fact that she trusted me enough to let me into this private hideaway of hers... well, obviously it was big.  Maybe big enough that she was thinking of giving me the access code.  Couldn't help to encourage her.  So I decided to stay.  Spent a few hours snooping around--she had to figure I would--checking out closets, drawers, family pictures, trinkets she'd brought with her when she'd had to move here at fifteen--generally filling in more of the blanks in this partner I'd ended up with.  Which I had to admit was worth the time spent.  Then I turned in early, desperate for the kind of clear sleep I'd missed in Toronto.

Which lasted until about 4 a.m., when I woke to footsteps in the living room that turned out to be Marita coming in with news I never could have anticipated: the old man was dead.  The group had finally had their fill and offed him; Marita'd arrived home from her party at the British Embassy to find a brief message from the Brit on her machine. 

It was the kind of news that turns your world upside down.  But it was also 4 a.m.  I was groggy as hell, the fact of it was almost too much to process; how many times had I dispatched the old fucker in my mind, figuring it would never happen for real?  And here was the bearer of my bad news--or good news--with one knee on the bed, looking like maybe if there hadn't been news to bring, she would have made some up.  I sat up; we talked.  She shivered; I invited her in where it was warm.  We curled up and went to sleep.  Woke up later and things heated up pretty fast.  We both slept like babies after that.  Spent the day lying around, talking, generally decompressing.  Worrying about whether it were really true that the old man was finally gone, never to mess up either of our lives again.  Marita promised to check out the details ASAP and let me know.

When she did, some of their facts didn't seem to jibe, but we weren't sure if we were just being paranoid about the whole thing.  Word was that the old man was going to be given a pauper's burial in a D.C. cemetery 'to keep any public interest from arising over his disappearance'.  Yeah, right.  Curiosity drove me there a week or so later in the drizzle and fog.  There was just a little rounded pillow of a headstone with 'C. G. Billings' carved on it and the dates.  I wished like anything he could have been there to see what they really thought of him.  There was still this little whisper of uncertainty in the back of my head but I put it aside; I had things to do, and anyway, I wasn't in a position to find out any more than what Marita already had.

After that I headed for Brussels and spent a week there while they made me a new arm.  It was a lot more comfortable than the old one, so it was worth the wait, though I didn't like the way I'd lost muscle in the stump.  I was going to have to make sure to exercise it regularly; no sense having it become more of a liability than it already was.  I also took the plunge and got a hook attachment for the arm.  It was a choice I hadn't wanted to face before, but the fact was it was a hell of a lot more useful than the hand, which was only good for making me look normal.  The hook was amazing, so much more controllable, letting me do a dozen little things that the hand would never be able to accomplish.  It wasn't for the street; it definitely wasn't going to help me blend in, and it could look intimidating. Then again, that might come in handy somewhere down the road.

I had a month after that with nothing to do, which drove me up the wall.  I'd have been much happier working myself until I dropped, distributing vaccine until all of it had been given out, then being able to rest knowing the work had been done and we were safe.  But it wasn't going to happen that way.  It had been nearly a month since I'd seen Marita, and it would be another five weeks before we got together after the second distribution, and frankly, my mind kept drifting back to reasons--maybe excuses--to meet with her.  But I knew she was busy, and more than that, that she needed to keep her focus.  Anyway, the pull I was feeling was starting to worry me.  Or at least, it worried me that I wasn't fighting it; I knew well enough what a classic danger sign it could be, the personal distraction that caught your eye and all of a sudden you were off the road and dead in a ditch.  I told myself that seeing Marita would just have to wait.

The second batch of vaccine had been marked out exclusively for military installations, which made sense from the point of having trained men able to fight a future invasion, but also because our vaccine would be slipped in with half a dozen others being given at the same time, so any reactions to it would be virtually impossible to trace.  Besides, it would be too late in the season--December--to pass the stuff off as flu shots in other venues.  I kept telling myself this one should be easy, but two weeks before the pick-up, I got the call I was hoping never to get from Marita: a high-level researcher at CamGen Toronto had died from a heart attack caused by the build-up of an unknown substance in an artery.  Anywhere else, the source of the problem might never have been found out, but in a bioresearch facility, where all the guy's buddies were researchers, too, it hadn't played out that way.  They'd dug in and ended up tracing the mysterious substance to our vaccine, which obviously had nothing to do with the flu.  Marita was beside herself. 

So I took off for Toronto to do damage control while Ansbach handled the medical diplomacy part.  All I had was the name of the researcher who'd made the discovery, obviously given to Marita by someone on the inside who had links to her and had been watching for post-inoculation incidents, and the fact that two vials of the vaccine had been left over after the inoculations were given, leaving them plenty to experiment on.  In the future we were going to have to make sure no stray doses were left lying around.  I called Ché before I left; any data they had on their computer system was going to need to be wiped, and it was probably going to take him some time to hack in.  It took me nearly a week until I was able to get into the right lab and set it on fire.  Like most big research firms, CamGen had plenty of security people on frequent patrols, but security has a notoriously fluid pool of employees; slipping in as a sub for someone eager for a day off wasn't all that difficult.

Which left me one problem: Klaus Schenker, the guy who'd traced our vaccine.  I wasn't looking forward to getting rid of anybody; I hadn't done any of that since before Mulder and I took off for Tunguska and frankly, I could really do without the aggravation.  But the fact was that as long as Schenker was in the picture, burned lab or no, he'd go on looking for the cause of his friend's death, and that could expose us pretty damn fast, and possibly destroy the entire planet's chance for survival. 

Whatever I did, it was going to have to look like an accident, nothing that could be traced back to the lab fire and the data glitch that had wiped out Schenker's research files.  Luckily, two days after the fire Schenker took a mental health day to try to come to terms with his losses and, enthusiastic ice fisherman that he was, headed north to Cook's Bay, which is where I caught up with him.  I wasn't in any condition to fight with a guy on the ice, and while a nice, clean shot fired from a hundred yards would've been my first choice, it would also leave blood and a bullet hole that was going to scream 'Investigate this!' if they managed to find the body.  So I did what I could, joined Schenker on the ice for a while, chatted about ice fishing in Europe and offered him some doctored coffee.  Fifteen minutes later all I had to do was come back and push him into his fishing hole.

It was quick, and as clean as I could have hoped for, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.  I was getting too old for this kind of shit.  I was tired of the ghosts that haunted the edges of my dreams, and the acid feeling in my gut afterward.  More than anything, this time it left me worried that, for as relieved as Marita would be to find her problem taken care of, she'd look at me differently now.

Three days later I flew to Cali and picked up the second batch of vaccine.  I hadn't yet shaken off the hit, so I was glad to be alone, though I couldn't help remembering the times Marita and I had been together, what a relief it had been to let down, to come together, get a clear night's sleep and maybe laugh over some crazy bit of apocalyptic black humor nobody else would ever get. 

The distribution was scheduled for just a week after I delivered the vaccine, which went to Army bases throughout the South.  This time I wasn't involved in any of the distributions, which was just as well because I was still in a mood.  Even when Marita and I met afterward, we didn't seem to have much to say to each other.  I think we were both still on edge from the CamGen scare, Marita had a bunch of social functions to show up at for the holidays--it was a couple of weeks before Christmas--so the meeting we had was brief, just an hour or so in the middle of her workday, and then she was gone again.  The next vaccine pickup wouldn't be for another two months.

I went back to D.C., caught up on my sleep, hung out with Ché, who insisted on boring me with every last detail of the process he'd gone through to destroy Schenker's files.  Found myself at the dead end of Franklin Street Northeast one day, staring at a little pillowed granite headstone.  That's when I knew I needed to get the hell out of town, clear my head somehow.  I called Marita but there was no answer.  Probably she'd gone somewhere for the holidays, though I remembered her saying she didn't get together with family.  Too many lies to keep straight, and she and her mother didn't see eye to eye.  The idea stuck in my head, though, and after a few more attempts to call her, I flew to New York.  I checked her place and the Brooklyn flat--no sign of her--then went to see Ansbach.  She'd gone to Mallorca for some R&R, he told me finally.  Alone.  I called and made myself a reservation.  I had no idea what I was going to say, what sort of reason I'd give for showing up on her doorstep, but at that point I really didn't care.  I needed to see her.

Long story short, she did open the door.  She let me in; I stayed for a week.  There wasn't much pretense of it having to do with business.  In fact, we tried not to think about anything strategic.  I can't say it was relaxing in the same way my week on the island had been, but it gave both of us what we needed at the time--the chance to come together, to decompress, to get away from the tension, the planning, the old men, her hectic schedule.  Being able to sit in a window soaking in the sun, to let down in a place where you knew the old men's snoops were nowhere around, or to wake up in a soft bed and not have to think of anything but the warm body tangled up with yours: priceless.

I knew Marita'd chosen the location because of her dad, though she never said it in so many words.  But they'd gone there together before he got really sick, right near the end.  And now, four years after he'd died, a good dozen after his plan had started as nothing more than a dream, it had finally become a living, breathing reality.  I had no illusions about an afterlife or being able to communicate with the dead, but I could see how, with all that had happened, the idea might appeal to her--go to a place that held good memories and maybe leave a note in a chink in some psychic wall in case his spirit might happen to wander by and find it.

I tried to stay out of her way when she needed the space.  Sometimes she'd go down and walk along the beach by herself; other times we'd go together, not speaking, Marita in her long beige coat, her sunglasses and scarf, and me in a coat and hat.  We must have looked like throwbacks to another time.  Once we hiked the rocky coastline near Cap de Formentor and sat huddled together on the cliffs, freezing in the winter wind, both of us caught up in the amazing shades of blue and green in the water hundreds of feet below.  By the end of the week, things had gotten a lot more personal between us than they'd been before, and when I left, it was knowing that we'd be together again in six weeks when, our luck holding, we'd have completed our third vaccine distribution and would need to connect to analyze the results.

Two things stood out in my mind in the weeks that followed: 1) that the old men and their scheming had taken just as much from Marita as they had from me, so any kind of payback I could engineer would serve her as well, and 2) that for all the years I'd spent hoping Mulder and I would click, in Marita I'd stumbled across the partner I'd always hoped for.  Mulder and I might share genes, but that was never going to make him change his view of me.  Anyway, he was stuck in his little fantasy world of 'truth' and 'honor' and 'justice'.  Which would all be well and good, I guess, if you could find a game where everybody was willing to play by the rules.  But when you're fighting an enemy who doesn't buy into your little ideals, let them guide your actions and you're going to end up dead in a hurry.  Besides, Mulder was never going to act against the real threat.  Hell, it wasn't even on his radar; he couldn't manage to see any farther than what affected his sister or Scully.  Marita, on the other hand, knew the score.  She'd been dragged into this fight, but she'd adapted, learned to swim instead of sink.  She was tough, realistic, observant and a good strategist.  We didn't agree on everything; sometimes it was like going a round or two in the ring, jostling ideas and opinions with her.  But at the end of the day, we were on the same page.  Which is what I'd been looking for all this time: someone I could count on.

The third vaccine pick-up, like the second, I made on my own.  Both of us would've liked to meet in Cali and have a couple of days together, but just knowing that we'd plan it for that reason made us leery.  There's only so far you can spread your focus without something going wrong, so in the end we decided we'd better play it safe.  The third distribution had initially been meant for a variety of pharmaceutical research campuses and universities, but since we were still worried about possible fallout from the CamGen incident, we diverted the entire 12,000-dose shipment to the military, funneling it to bases throughout the Midwest. 

It was mid-February by then.  Marita had plans to meet me afterward at a ski resort in Vermont, but at the last minute she ended up with some sudden priority project at the U.N. and had to cancel.  The next batch of vaccine was due to be picked up the second week in April and I hoped by then she'd be able to work out some time away.  But the pick-up never happened.  What did happen was a rebel strike in Kazakhstan that changed everything.

\----------------------------

SCENE: SAFE HOUSE

_After the first distribution of their secret vaccine, Krycek and Marita meet up in New York._

_Note: This was a background piece written to explore how the dynamic between Krycek and Marita might have changed after their meeting in Cali and the subsequent distribution of the initial batch of vaccine.  As with Convergence, the fly-on-the-wall style, while not geared to typical story pacing/tension, allowed me a window through which to simply observe the characters and find out where things stood between them.  Recently I came across this file, nearly forgotten, and remembered that a friend had urged me to post it along with the rest of the backstory._  

 

"So, where are we?" I say when we're standing outside the door of a fourth-floor walk-up and Marita pulls out a key. I've followed her--discreetly enough--for two blocks from our scheduled meeting point at an Italian deli and she hasn't said a word to me so far.

"A place I keep," she says, turning to me now. "Under the radar." There's a momentary sharpness in her gray eyes that says this is a secret she guards tightly, one she's trusting me not to give away. Then her expression changes. "I thought you'd need a place to stay. It seems prudent at this point not to stay where you could be noticed."

"Good point."

Hi, how are you doing? Have a nice flight? But I guess we'll get to that. As usual, her mind's probably on a dozen strategic details. And I can't blame her for that.

The door swings open and we go inside. It's a tiny place: little living room, a kitchen alcove and another door that I assume leads to a bathroom and bedroom. Just a couple of pictures on the wall, a plain sofa and chair, a small sound system sitting on a built-in bookshelf on the wall, with a few books above it. Not the vacant look you get from a hotel room, but not decorated--claimed--the way women tend to do with their personal space. Which is smart. Even though nobody's supposed to know about this place, she's not taking chances.

"So," she says, taking off her raincoat and sitting down in the chair. She's wearing a turtleneck sweater, kind of a creamy color, and gray slacks. I want to pull her up out of the chair, nip at the side of that pale neck, press her against me until we touch off the kind of white-hot fusion we sparked the last time we were together, in Cali.

But who knows if things will even go that way. It's business first--business that could mean the difference between life and death a few years down the road.

I sit down on the couch and rearrange the dead arm. "Like I said," I start, referring to the e-mail I sent her the day before, "for the most part things went pretty smoothly. The people with injection reactions who came back to the health center, the doctors didn't seem too concerned. No obvious panic about what it might mean. Still, they did say they were going to check with the manufacturer about the batch."

She looks tired suddenly.

"We got that covered?"

"We should. But it depends who they talk to. There's a phone number included with each shipment; it goes to one of our people who will address any concerns. The problem will be if someone already has a personal contact inside the manufacturer we're claiming to be, and calls them directly. If they go that route, we could be in trouble."

I let out a slow breath. "Outside chance," I say.

"Yes. Outside."

And so it goes for a while. We talk shop, compare notes, go over what's crucial, avoiding the messy work of figuring out where the two of us stand after Cali, when things took a turn I don't think either of us had anticipated.

Our first vaccine distribution hasn't raised any critical red flags--so far, anyway--and now we can count 12,000 people protected from the Oil: 2,500 vaccinated at the CamGen research facility in Toronto, 500 each at three universities in the Boston area, plus 7,000 staff and troops at Wright-Patterson air base and the Naval Training Station north of Chicago. The military base results have shown, though, that we're better off slipping in our product where other shots are being given at the same time, so any side effects won't be easily traced to our vaccine.

Eventually things start to wind down. Marita gives me a weary smile, the first real break in her Superwoman façade since we've been here.

"You look like you haven't taken that vacation," I say.

For a split second she starts to bristle, but then her head relaxes; she lets it fall back against the chair.

For a moment I just watch her, the way her hair falls onto the cushion, softer somehow than whatever she does to it during the work week. "More to deal with than usual?"

"Yes." She looks up at the ceiling, seeming to study the shadows or shapes or maybe just something inside her head. "I don't know which is worse," she says finally. "The preparation or the waiting afterward."

"I hear you." I let out a sigh and loosen a little.

"Two weeks until your orthopedic appointment, am I right?" She glances over at me.

I nod. Time to get the prosthesis retooled, pain that it is. "And the next batch of vaccine? It's going to be ready December 8th?

She nods, but her eyes are closed. She opens them. "I can't say precisely what my schedule might be then, depending on..."

I wait a couple of beats. "What?"

"I'm not sure if I'll be able to get away, either because of commitments here or because the board might be watching me. Would you be able to make the pick-up then?"

"As far as I know, sure." I give my most casual 'no big deal' shrug but this is exactly what I've been waiting for--a sign of trust, the kind that will lead to her giving me that access code. This place she's brought me is another good sign. Both really good; I smile to myself. When I refocus on Marita, her eyes are closed again.

I take in a slow, quiet breath and clear my throat. "Looks like you've had a long day," I say, as casual as I can. "Maybe you should take a load off."

But instead of the reaction I'm hoping for, she sits up, one of those quick switches she does, like the one from soft/drowsy woman in bed to near-instant strategist.

"I have a commitment," she says, reaching beside the chair for the bag she's brought with her, pale hair slipping to one side as she does it. "A function at the British embassy. It's imperative that I make an appearance."

She takes a small pouch from the bag and disappears into the hallway. I take a deep breath and force myself to switch gears and focus on my plans beyond this meeting: heading back to D.C., where I'll hang out until I need to fly to Brussels. Got to check in with Ché there's always the chance he'll have come across some useful intel. And I'd probably better make sure I know what Mulder is up to, in case he's on the road to causing some disaster we haven't caught wind of yet.

When Marita comes out again, she's wearing a long, skinny skirt--some kind of silky stuff, a deep blue--and a sleeveless velvet top to match. Diamond necklace, earrings to go with it. Her hair's swept up and fixed somehow at the back of her neck. I tell myself not to gape.

"Nice," I say.

"Thank you."

"You aren't, uh, expected to show up alone at these things, are you?"

"I have an escort."

Very matter of fact, but her words hit me like a punch in the gut.

"He's a childhood friend. From home," she adds. "He needs to be seen in certain social circles. As do I. It's convenient--an exchange of favors."

I try for a neutral shrug, wondering how far the 'favors' extend. Why has she bothered to come here at all if she's going off somewhere? "Have fun."

"It's business, Alex." She drills me with one eye, letting me know that I haven't exactly succeeded in hiding my reaction. "It keeps my contacts active, keeps critical doors open."

"Then it's a good thing."

"Tiring, but necessary." She picks her coat off the chair back and slips it around her shoulders.

"So will I catch you again tomorrow, or..."

Or is this it?

"I'm not sure how long this will go on." She hesitates. "Yes. Tomorrow, definitely. I'll call you first."

And with a few instructions about the phone and there being food in the fridge, she's gone, the door clicking closed behind her.

Silence.

After a few seconds I stand and look around, wondering again what I've gotten myself into, working with a woman like this. After the first time, I told myself I'd never do it again. Apparently I'm a slow learner.

But this is different. Everything's on the line here; it's not like I have a choice.

I go into the kitchen, poke around in the fridge, take out the various deli boxes she's brought and serve myself up something to eat. It's been six hours since lunch and I'm starving, so I down the stuff quickly, then set my plate in the sink, wander into the bedroom and pause in front of the window with its small, bordered panes. It's nearly dark; in the beam of a streetlight below I can see the reds and oranges of leaves putting on their final show of the season.

Before winter comes. My head fills with cold, gray impressions, but not of the area around Sverdlovsk where I grew up: instead, they're images of cities left blasted and hollow, mass graves, temporary survivors with sunken eyes and hardly any meat on their bones. The insides of silos--

I catch myself, move away from the window, go into the living room and turn on a couple of lights. Push out a breath and take a glance around me. Well, no use wasting time and opportunity. I should take a look around, see what there is to learn here. She's got to figure I'll do it.

The place is more revealing than I'd figured on. In the built-in drawers below the bookcase there are pictures, family photos for the most part: one drawer of miscellaneous, one for her father and another for her brother. I think about it: the fact that she keeps them, but not at the place where she lives most of the time. She's got a penchant for compartmentalizing.

This flat is at the end of the building, so the bedroom wall slopes down on one end and above the window, giving the room a close, almost attic feel. For some reason--I can't pinpoint why--I think maybe that appeals to her. There's a double bed, a dresser with a doily on top and a little glass bottle shaped like a bird set in the center, a rocking chair with no arms. A shawl with fringes is laid over the back of it.

I check the closet: a small selection of clothes, pretty much something for every occasion; a shoe rack; an organizer with boxes on the shelves. I take one down and look inside. Trinkets: a pencil box, a brightly hand-painted bird, a ceramic pin of some primitive flying figure--things she probably brought with her from Peru when she was fifteen, when the old buzzard tightened the thumb screws on her father. I close the box and put it back in its place. It's like she keeps her past here, the life she's set aside--been forced to set aside--and once in a while she comes back to look at it, maybe touch it for a little while to remind herself it wasn't all a dream, that once she had a life that didn't revolve around the countdown to a nightmare future.

I find myself at the window again, one foot tapping insistently against the floor. It's dark outside now. Turning away, I glance around the bedroom and frown. I could use a wall to put my fist through right about now. I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm treading water, or wasting time waiting for something undefined that I'm not sure will even come to pass. Probably just the aftereffect of watching hundreds of doses of vaccine being given, then waiting and hoping like anything there wouldn't be the kinds of reactions or unforeseen glitches that would expose us or halt the progress of the Plan. Like Marita said, it's hard to tell which is worse: the preparation or waiting afterward for one--or maybe both--shoes to drop.

Still, why did she even bother to tell me about this embassy party? Would have been a lot easier to just give me a line about having an appointment somewhere.

She could have changed her clothes somewhere else, too.

_You don't own her. It's not like she's breached some kind of contract._

True. What happened in Cali seemed pretty overwhelming, but neither of us has made any professions of... anything. No rules were laid down; it didn't seem like that kind of thing. But this guy, her 'friend'...

_You sound like your own little soap opera._

Maybe it's a test to see how far I'll trust her, one of her 'I don't know you well enough' things to see if I'm worthy of whatever privilege she may decide to grant me. Like Jeremiah Smith at his inscrutable best a couple of months back, telling me he had critical information to share with 'the right person', though he hadn't decided who that would be. Obviously not me, thanks for the big vote of confidence.

I sit down on the corner of the bed, let my head drop into my hand and close my eyes. Pretty soon a yawn overtakes me, and then another.

_Go to bed, Aleksei. You're not doing yourself any good like this._

I sit up. There's no TV here to waste time in front of, either, so I dig through my bag for a clean pair of boxers, shower and get ready to turn in. When I'm done I set a clean socket liner beside the arm and harness on top of the dresser and pause. Reaching for a drawer knob, I hesitate and then pull it open. A camisole or maybe a short nightgown, all folded nicely, a soft gray-green color in some sort of silky material. Skinny little straps. I run the back of a finger across the smooth surface and close my eyes.

Lying in bed a few minutes later, I glance up at the dull pattern of light on the ceiling. Marita's right. I don't know her, and a couple of rolls in the hay doesn't change that. But we're making progress. She brought me here. And she wants me to pick up the next batch of vaccine on my own. That has to say something; hopefully it means she's getting closer to giving me that retrieval code, which could be critical down the road if something goes wrong.

Sighing, I roll onto my back to escape the thump-thump-thump of my pulse in my ear. There's got to be a way to get away from this tension, the buzzing that never seems to completely leave these days. At least long enough that I can fall asleep.

Deliberately I make myself picture the approach to the island: the first glimpse of the mountains in the distance, cool and blue, each paler than the one in front of it, like a series of cardboard cut-outs in graduated colors; the gentle dipping and rocking of the ferry and the brisk, salt bite of the breeze that makes me squint as my destination inches closer.  
 

*~*~*~*

  
Next thing I know, I'm hearing footsteps cross the darkened living room. Immediately I roll, groping for the gun beside my pants on the floor.

"Alex?" Marita's voice comes tentatively.

"Yeah." I'm thick-headed, groggy as hell.

"Sorry to disturb you..."

I squint toward the alarm clock on the bedside table--4 a.m.--and pull up, my heart beating a little faster; anything happening at this hour can't be a good sign. Marita comes in and stands beside the bed in the dark.

I frown. "What's up?"

"When I got home I received some news from Davies." The Brit.

I wait.

"It's Spender."

"What?"

That 'ah'-and-a-pause thing she does, and then her voice. "He's been shot." She puts one knee on the edge of the bed and sits down there. "He's dead, Alex."

"What?" I blink in the darkness, trying to work some moisture into my eyes.

"Apparently the board finally had enough of him."

" _They_  had it done." It's a question and a statement both. For years I've dreamed of getting news like this--fantasized about a hundred ways to take him out myself. But this, now... "Details?"

"I don't know," she says. I can hear the smile in her voice, though, see the corners of her mouth upturned, even in the shadowy light. "It was just a brief message. Voicemail."

Part of me wants to get up and dance on the bed; the other part feels strange. He's always been there, the NKVD agent parked at the curb of my life in his Black Maria, its motor running.

"I thought you'd want to know," she adds, a seeming afterthought.

"Yeah." I shake my head. I know the reality of it isn't sinking in. My mouth wants to grin but my brain is stuck in neutral. "So when'd you find this out?"

"About three hours ago. I'd gotten home and was putting my things away when I noticed the light flashing on the phone. I was... shocked. I think I still am."

"And between then and now?"

She turns away slightly. "I tried to sleep, but--"

Probably she couldn't. But it's not what she says.

"I thought you'd want to know."

Flashes of memory flicker through my head: his visits to the orphanage; the first time he took me to the camp and made me watch the Oil invade a man. The strange little 'homecoming' he had for me in Tashkent after I'd finished my tour in Afghanistan. The car bomb, and the smothering blackness of the silo with its thick, chilled walls. I shiver in spite of myself.

" 'S cold in here," I say.

"Yes."

"You haven't slept, have you? It's the middle of the night."

She shrugs. Lets out a sigh.

"Come on," I say, pulling back the blankets. "Take a load off. Warm up." I wait for a reaction. "It's nice in here."

She shrugs, smiles just slightly.

"I give a passable back rub."

She seems to take a minute to consider that. Then she's standing, slipping off her sweater, unbuttoning her pants. She lays the clothes over the back of the rocker and slips into bed beside me. I reach out, pull her close. She turns away and settles back spooned against me. I reach for the side of her neck and start to rub, but she takes my hand, pulls it around her waist and holds it there.

"I always thought it would make a difference," she says finally. "Through the years, thinking about this happening. That it would change things. But it doesn't. The situation's still the same."

"Let it go, Marita. Get some rest."

I bury my nose in the hair at the back of her neck and close my eyes.

And we doze off for a while, maybe an hour or so. When we wake up, we're pretty much wrapped around each other, and you can guess where things go from there. "Smile," I say at one point, looking up at her when we're in the thick of things. And she does. For some reason it makes us both laugh--the old man's dead, after all, never to breathe his sour breath on either of us again--and everything moves pretty quickly after that.

Lying there afterward, my fingers trace the place where her hairline dips into a 'V' in the center of her forehead. Marita's loosening, starting to drift. My fingers slip down to her shoulder, touching on something soft that got pushed aside in a hurry a little while ago. Curious, I pull up slightly, careful not to disturb her. Slowly my mouth comes open: it's the little pink camisole, the one she wore in Cali.

I ease my head back onto the pillow, arch carefully to stretch my neck and lie there smiling to myself, listening to the soft rhythm of her breathing, the weight of her body against my hip. Until a sudden soberness comes over me.

"Marita?"

"Mm?"

"About the old man. You should check for details. Just to be sure."

I wait.

"Yes," she says drowsily. "In the morning."

Beyond the window, the sky's beginning to lighten.

"Sleep, krasavitsa," I whisper. "While you can."

\------------------------------

NARRATIVE E

_The Rebel strike in Kazakhstan; Krycek comes up with a plan to bring the Consortium to its knees, and heads for New York._

 

Luckily I was already in Russia when the attack came.  I'd figured I'd better check out the Moscow scene and find out what was happening with the contacts I had there--catch up with Tolya, who always had some interesting, offbeat intel to share, and maybe spend some time schmoozing with Petrovich.  A lot of times the interesting stuff only comes up after you've hung out with someone a while and both of you have loosened up.

Anyway, that's where I was when the word came in--with Petrovich.  The message said a recon flight had picked up a gathering of vehicles engulfed in flames thirty miles into the mountains beyond Ust-Kamenogorsk in eastern Kazakhstan... just before it was nearly sideswiped by a craft it couldn't identify.  Granted, it could have been coincidence.  But there were too many red flags for me: a) it was a gathering thirty miles out into the middle of nowhere, which made no sense; b) the location followed the pattern of abductions we'd seen, which had been moving gradually eastward; and c) the city these people had come from had a predominantly Russian population rather than native Kazakhs, and that fit the abduction pattern exactly.  In the incidents we'd investigated, they'd taken Russians and spit the occasional Kazakh back out.

~*~*~*~

Marita: (picks up the phone and pauses a second) Who is it? Alex?

Krycek: Yeah. Something's come up.

Marita: What? Something bad?

Krycek: There's been some kind of incident at a place in eastern Kazakhstan, cars burning. Actually, a bunch of cars in a basically unpopulated area, which is suspicious in itself; I mean, what the hell would anybody have been doing out there? (pause)  Along with the report of an unidentified craft.

Marita: Do you think it has anything to do with the recent abductions? Do they know what it is?

Krycek: Not yet. (long pause) Anyway, I'm 'they'. I pulled some strings a while back, got myself appointed to the joke job of the year--checking out these abduction reports for the military. I'm the Russian Mulder; how's that for irony? (pause) I figured we'd need to keep on top of anything that might be happening here. I'm waiting for a team to pick me up.  We'll be there in a few hours.

Marita: Do you think word will get out?

Krycek: Hell, I hope not. (pause) Look, I've got to go. They're here to pick me up.

Marita: Keep me informed.

Krycek: Will do.

Marita: And Alex... be careful.

Krycek: Sure. I'll call you.

~*~*~*~

Within an hour Petrovich had rounded up my group and had us on a military jet heading for Ust-Kamenogorsk.  I'd had maybe twenty seconds to call Marita before I took off, so she'd have a heads-up about what was going on.  Then it was two hours on a plane, the knot in my gut growing tighter and tighter.  I wanted to rationalize it away, but there was a bad feeling I couldn't shake that what we'd seen was just the match spark that would set off something a whole lot bigger... and a whole lot worse.  Who knew what it would turn out to be, and how it might affect our vaccine program.  By now I knew Marita well enough to know how she'd be feeling, waiting for word, tensing up more and more until we could determine it wasn't as bad as we thought.

An hour after we landed, we reached ground zero.  The sky had been starting to lighten as we descended into Ust-Kamenogorsk, and by the time we reached the site the sun had risen above the surrounding peaks.  The scene we found was bizarre: charred bodies, cars smoking and in some cases still with a few flames coming off them.  The presence of so many vehicles and people could mean one of two things: either it was a local group of UFO watchers who'd come because of some recent activity we hadn't heard about, or these people were already Colonist-tagged, drawn here by the chips in their necks.  But it made no sense to call your pawns together and then destroy them.  Which led to two more possibilities, neither of them good: that the Colonists were up to something we'd never dreamed off, or that what we were seeing was the work of some new group, enemies of the Colonists fighting them for turf or influence. 

I didn't have long to speculate, though, because in walking the perimeter of the area, we came across the boy.  Or he stumbled into me, unlucky little sucker.  He was spooked from the get-go, but when we started asking him questions, he turned into a babbling mess, begging to know where his family was.  He hadn't said much more than something about a group of people his parents knew and men without faces when Marita came swooping in with her entourage from the U.N.

Just what we needed.  As if there weren't enough confusion already, now I had to play games and pretend I didn't know her.  They didn't stay long, and I could tell she was unnerved by seeing me there with so many men under my command--obviously she wasn't ready for that--but I was too busy trying to absorb what information we'd gotten from the kid and what the implications might be to give it too much thought.  What I realized soon enough was that we had two alien factions in this now and the outlook for humanity's future on this planet had just gotten a whole lot bleaker.

After Marita and her people left, I went back to questioning the kid.  He'd said enough already that I didn't want my men hearing whatever else he might know, so I told them it would be better if I questioned him alone, that likely he'd settle down without an audience around.  That turned out to be the most coherent interview I had with him.  He described the men without faces, the firestarting wand he'd seen one torch a guy with.  As I figured, the people were all from Ust-Kamenogorsk.  There'd been no plans for a gathering; his father had just packed them up early in the evening, seemingly on a whim, and driven off into the mountains.  But of the families he recognized there, each had at least one adult family member who'd been abducted before.  Both Dmitri's parents were abductees.

There seemed no escaping the conclusion that these new aliens were intent on chipping away at--maybe outright destroying--the Colonists' holdings, which meant the old men's playbook was useless now.  And that made them vulnerable.  Granted, they had more experience than anyone else on the planet at negotiating with an alien race, and that experience was going to be critical in the days ahead.  But without a knowledge of what was going on now, of who their enemy was... well, they were ripe for a little reorganization.  From the top down. 

~*~*~*~

Marita: (answers her ringing phone) Yes?

Krycek: What the hell were you doing there?

Marita: You could see what I was doing there. They found out somehow, one of their sources. They sent me because I've got the most logical cover. I could hardly refuse.

Krycek: (snorts out a breath) Yeah, well, I want to know what kind of surveillance they've got in the area to have found out about this so quickly.

Marita: Well, it's immaterial at the moment. (pause) Where are you?

Krycek: Making travel plans.

Marita: What about the boy, Alex? What have you found out?

Krycek: That we're in a hell of a lot more trouble than we've ever been before.

Marita: What does that mean?

Krycek: I'm not sure yet. And I'm not sure we'll really know unless this happens again and somebody who knows something about these aliens happens to see it.

Marita: But what exactly did he say?

Krycek: I'll tell you when I see you. Right now I've got to get this kid to the old men.

Marita: (taken aback) What?

Krycek: Look, I don't know how much time we've got, but this is our chance, Marita. Maybe our only chance. If we swap this kid and the information he's got--"

Marita: What information?

Krycek: That they're not the same aliens. They're a different group. And it looks like what they're after is to fry the Colonists' pawns. It's a turf war, Marita.

Marita: My god.

Krycek: Which is why we've got to move now. Swapping this kid to the old men for whatever vaccine research they've done--they'll essentially be out of business. They'll have to start taking orders instead of giving them. We can bring them down, Marita.

Marita: Our first priority has to be to protect the distribution program. The Elders will never act from anything but their own self-interest. Their contacts, their methods-- And if something were to go wrong in the process of making a deal with them, you know they wouldn't use the boy's information to help ensure human survival.

Krycek: Ouch! Sh--

Marita: What happened?

Krycek: Just trying to get my damn boot off. Rammed the edge of an eyelet up under my fingernail. (pause) So what are you saying? We both know the old fuckers don't have anybody's best interests at heart but their own.

Marita: This seems like a situation that's going to require collaboration, Alex. Serious collaboration. If we're considering working with anyone, it should be someone we can trust not to betray our goals. Someone who could help us reach them.

Krycek: And who would that be?

Marita: Anyone but them. (She swallows, pauses.) I think Mulder could be helpful. I know he's naive, but--

Krycek: Mulder?  Mulder sees about two inches from the end of his damn nose, Marita. And if you can't dangle his sister on a stick in front of him, you're not going to get him to believe you, much less commit to whatever's going to need to be done. Anyway, what influence does he have?

Marita: There's Assistant Director Skinner. Mulder's close to him. Surely there must be other people around them, men with authority who will pay attention if they understand that the situation is critical.

Krycek: Listen to yourself, Mare. You're grasping at straws.  Betting on Mulder and Skinner would be like taking a flying leap into the unknown.

Marita: Where 'the known' has a track record of doing exactly the opposite of what we need.

Krycek: But the old men have the background.  They've got years of contact experience; they've got people in place. Look, I've waited for years to see them get some kind of payback--

Marita: And I've been under their thumb for years myself, Alex.  But dead and avenged is a poor substitute for surviving. For making survival a possibility.

Krycek: Look, I gotta go. Someone's coming. I'll--

Marita: This is serious, Alex.  Think about it.

Krycek: Okay, I'll--. Okay.  (He hangs up.)

~*~*~*~

Okay, so she wasn't crazy about my idea, but she'd come around; we'd gotten close enough by now that I knew how she thought.  She was worried about the old men with good reason, but realistically Mulder and Skinner, even if they did want to help, would manage to spill the word somewhere inside the hallowed halls of the Hoover building, and the fact was that the place was crawling with Consortium collaborators.  As soon as they said anything, it would be all over for Marita and me.  Anyway, Mulder and Skinner were only two men; no matter how invested they might be, they didn't have the power to stop or change things or influence policy, and they had no resources to back them up.  What were they going to do, try and halt the alien ships by flashing their badges? 

Talking with Marita only strengthened my feeling that what I had planned was the only way to go.  And she was right about one thing: the old men would do whatever they could to get around us.  Which was why it was imperative to safeguard my bargaining chip.  And the most effective way I knew to do that lay nearly 700 miles to the northeast of where I was.  I had to find a way to get there.

The problem was that I needed two planes: one to get me to the camp, the other to ferry the rest of my team back to Moscow.  But calling in a second plane would not only raise alarm bells, it would mean negotiating for permissions and having to answer questions I had no intention of raising.  So I did what made the most sense at the time: I left the troops at the airport in Ust-Kamenogorsk with a story about having to deliver our witness to experts immediately for debriefing and took off.  It would be a little more than an hour's trip, and then the plane could turn around, go back for my team and take them home.  I'd have some explaining to do when they caught up with me, but with any luck that was something that would only come to light in the paperwork weeks later.

Time had started to blur.  By the time we got into Krasnoyarsk it was noon, and we were looking at the better part of an hour's drive to the camp.  I hadn't slept except for maybe half an hour on the plane out from Moscow, and on this last flight I'd divided my time between questioning the kid again and planning out my strategy for getting into the camp so I could accomplish what I needed to get done.  Which was going to be tricky after my little adventure with Mulder the year before.

Then there was the business of having to patch things up with Marita.  But she was smart; if she'd taken any time to think about it, she'd already have seen her mistake.  Mulder and Skinner could never have the kind of strategic value of the old men's experience and the network they'd put together.  And if there was any situation that called for big guns, this was it.

I was going to have to go into the camp as my financial liaison persona; the guards knew me and hopefully I'd be able to take care of things and be out the back door again before Lev found out I was around.  But it wasn't going to be easy: there'd be no second chances, and no time for false moves.  I'd have to get Andrei to cooperate, though I knew he wasn't going to like what I had in mind.  Since we'd discovered him, I'd grilled the kid half a dozen times, but after each session he ended up more wild-eyed and emotional than before.  It was starting to sink in how his life had changed.  He was alone now, his family gone, his friends gone, his world turned inside out. 

And he didn't even know about what I had planned for him. 

He'd described the firestarting men with no eyes and no mouths.  When I gave him a piece of paper so he could draw what he'd seen, the thing that jarred me the most was that his alien looked a lot like the bounty hunter.  I would have shown him a picture of the guy to make sure, but I can't draw for shit, and I had no way to connect with Marita at that point.  When I did, though, I'd make damn sure she got me a picture of him if there was any way to do it.  The implications of these guys looking like the bounty hunter, say having his powers and his ability to shape-shift and avoid detection... Well, let's just say it made the blood run like ice through my veins. 

By the time we were nearing the camp, the kid was starting to fall apart.  I just wanted him to shut up; he had to shut up so I could slip him into the camp unnoticed.  I was about ready to backhand him, but then I realized that playing his buddy would likely get me better results.  So I told him we were going to get him some help, and help for families like his so this wouldn't happen again.  He was going to tell them what he'd experienced, and then we'd get him back to his hometown and his relatives.  Part of me was sick at what I was doing--hell, I'd been a kid myself once, fed my share of bullshit by adults who cared nothing about me--but what Marita'd said kept echoing in my head: the old men weren't going to give up power meekly.  I needed to ensure that they couldn't steal the kid and his information from me, circumvent us.  Which is why we'd come here.  I told myself the kid would survive; it'd been hell there for a while with the Oil inside me, but in the end I'd made it.  The diver's wife had made it.  And there was no other way I could see to guarantee that things would go the way I needed them to.

Once we'd gotten past the gatekeeper, I managed to find someone to call Andrei for me, but before he showed up cold reality hit: he wasn't going to do this without a fight.  Everything had made sense on the way here--in the theoretical--but actually standing in one of the camp's interrogation rooms, marking time, I knew things were going to go badly between us.  By this time the kid had realized I'd lied to him, and when he started freaking and screaming, which was going to get us found out in a hurry, I took a swing at him and hit him in the nose.  Okay, broke it, which gave him two black eyes to boot.  Just the impression I wanted to make on Andrei.  But what could I do?

So Andrei's help didn't exactly come voluntarily.  He knew as well as I did how critical it was to fight the Oil, but that didn't mean he bought my busting the kid's nose... or what I wanted done to him.  He wasn't like that; he was a good man at heart, one of the best I'd known.  But I pushed ahead; what I needed, I needed.  Finally Andrei sent the kid off to get filled up, trying to justify it to himself, trying to remind himself there was a greater need here, the need to fight the Oil, and sometimes people get sacrificed.  But when it got to the sewing...

Look, if I had two hands, I'd have done it myself and saved Andrei the hassle, but I don't.  And at that point he said no.  No way.  I opened my mouth, but how could I rationalize this to the guy who'd saved my life?  So Andrei stitched the kid up with a Glock 32 pointed at his head.  He wiped some kind of topical anesthetic on the boy so it wouldn't hurt as much, but even so we ended up having to stick a rag in his mouth while Andrei did his eyes and ears, and I was forced to sit there listening to him, watching the needle go in and out while I saw the bond I'd had with this man who'd done so much for me slip right down the drain.

But it was war, what was going on, and in war there's no victory without loss.  I kept the thought looping through my head until the work was done.

By the time the kid was prepped, I was on a pretty short fuse.  I had to get him out of the camp ASAP, before anyone found us.  Andrei called a guard to bring some fresh clothes and a ski mask for the kid; it was still winter, thank god, so he wasn't going to seem out of place all bundled up.  I took the boy into another room to dress him since he wasn't in any condition to do it himself.  He moaned and whimpered and fought me, probably wondering what the hell I was up to, which only made me jumpier than before.  And when I finally finished and went back to say a last word in my defense to Andrei, I found him swinging from the overhead pipes in the room we'd been in.  Fucker was nearly gone, but one eye followed me, letting me know this one was for me, his final protest. 

Something cold shot through me; I broke into a sweat and turned away fast, slammed the door behind me, retrieved the kid and focused on getting us the hell out of there.  The gate guards let us through on my word that Lev had authorized us to leave, though I knew he'd find out soon enough and be on our trail.  I had a driver waiting outside, and I told him to step on it.  As we raced down the hillside, I remembered the bouncing truck from the last time I'd been there, Mulder at the wheel pushing on that brake pedal and getting no response at all, me tensing and ready to roll, and the pain that shot through my shoulder when I landed on the gravel.  I held that thought; it was better by far than the picture that had already burned itself into a back corner of my brain, of Andrei slowly swinging from a length of electrical cord.

When we got to Krasnoyarsk, while we were waiting for our next ride, I managed to make a quick call to Marita.  Looking back, I may not have been completely on top of how the conversation was going; by then I was wound nearly to the breaking point, dead on my feet and expecting to see Lev's men come barreling around the corner at any moment. 

~*~*~*~

[Marita answers her ringing phone]

Krycek: Marita?

Marita: Yes? Where are you?

Krycek: I've got kind of a complex itinerary to keep myself under the radar. I should be in New York in about 18 hours if my luck holds.

Marita: But--

Krycek: It's the only way, Marita. Look, you go to Mulder, how long do you think it would take before one of the collaborators in the Bureau got wind of it? There goes your vaccine project. They could end up finding us, taking both of us out. (pause) Look, I need you to do something for me.

Marita: (after a pause) What?

Krycek: Let them know you saw me there. Let them know I've got someone they need to have. Get them salivating a little.

Marita: You're just going to turn the boy over to them?

Krycek: Once they've given me what I want, they won't have any leverage left. We'll be calling the shots.

Marita: (says nothing)

Krycek: Mare? You there?

Marita: (after a beat) Yes. (clears throat) How will I know where to find you?

Krycek: I'll get a message to you.

(Dmitri moans in the background)

Marita: What was that?

Krycek: Nothing. I'll call you.

Marita: (hesitates) Yes.

[Krycek hangs up]

~*~*~*~

The next trick--maybe as hard to pull off as getting in and out of the camp--was going to be getting the two of us from Krasnoyarsk to New York before the kid went too many hours without food and fluids. I'd called Petrovich because he had more connections--and the influence to go with them--than anyone else I knew.  I wasn't taking any route that would let the old men, or Lev, or anyone else trace or intercept me; the trip had to be smooth, quick and under the radar.  Petrovich sent a plane that took us through Moscow to Iceland, then to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we were picked up by a helicopter and dropped onto a Russian freighter heading into the port of New York.  They'd be expecting me to fly in, so this gave me the element of surprise as well as a little lead time to get away while they searched for me if things went bad.

But I have to admit that as we approached the port, the nervous beat inside me was sharing space with a growing high like nothing I'd ever felt before.  I thought back to when I was a kid; I hadn't been so much different from this small-village boy.  Then all the old man's training and prepping that seemed to be for nothing after he decided to dump me.  If only the old fucker were alive to see this.  It would make the perfect comeback: having the old man here to watch me take over and dump all the research he and his buddies had been doing for the last fifty years, them and their ex-Nazi scientists and the sadistic M.D.s left over from Japan's infamous 731.  Great company the old men kept. 

The kid was half out of it for most of the trip, which meant that at least I didn't have to look at him every ten minutes and be nose to nose with what I'd had done to him.  Believe me, it was nothing I would have chosen if the circumstances had been different.  Hopefully my negotiations with the group would go quickly; otherwise Marita would have to find us someone to hook the kid to an IV.  It'd been a day and a half by now and though I'd made it that long myself many a time, there was no telling what it would do to a boy, especially one who'd been through what he had.

I was worn out from all the travel, the stress and the bare minimum of sleep I'd been getting, but the thought of Marita gave me a second wind. The longer we'd worked together, the more in sync we'd become, especially after the week we'd spent together in Mallorca.  She was going to be my first contact when I got in.  I could tell she still hadn't bought solidly into my plan when we last talked, but it was pretty much par for the course for us to disagree and jostle around some in the process of coming to a decision.  With a little time to breathe, a little downtime together, she'd see that this was the right way to go.  After all, they'd screwed her over, too.  She'd wrung herself out fighting their agenda behind the scenes; she deserved some satisfaction.

As soon as we reached port, I left a message for her.  Then I called the board room and spelled out my terms.  I didn't tell them exactly where I was; it would give Marita some lead time, a chance to get to the ship so we could talk before the old men located me.  But as it turned out, the Brit had had his suspicions about her and trailed her when she left their meeting.

I can't say for sure what happened, and it's not like I haven't spent way too much time thinking about it since that day.  She opened that door and her voice was a challenge, but like I said before, it fit right into the pattern we'd gone through a half dozen other times when we'd first seen each other and things were tense.  I was coiled up, bursting with what was about to go down, and seeing her standing there, gorgeous as ever, I just wanted to devour her.  That she wanted me, too, at that moment was like reaching the summit of the mountain I'd been climbing.

No, I didn't see it coming.  Not by a long shot.  

\------------------------------

SCENE: WATERFRONT

_Marita at the freighter dock in *Patient X_

 

Marita sets the parking brake and switches off the motor.  Her eyes fall closed momentarily as she reaches for peace or certainty or some relief she knows won't come.  Her fingers, tight around the steering wheel, throb with the headlong rush of the last forty hours.  She doesn't want to be here thinking this, doing this.

Two days ago the world was sane.  At least, as sane as it gets with the clock ticking down to an extraterrestrial invasion.  Now everything has been tumbled end-for-end: Alex's first ominous call,  incinerated abductees, a new alien enemy.  Long, tense hours in a military jet, the fear gnawing steadily deeper into her.  At their destination, the horrifying evidence.

Then her own personal horror.  Before the incident, no decision had ever been unilateral.  They'd always discussed.  Debated--heatedly sometimes--but in the end there'd always been agreement, a united front.  Strength.

Shattered, now, over the fate of a boy.

For months he's been a pillar holding up the ceiling over her world, Alex with his raw grit and his determination.  His grin; the smoke of his voice; the strong arm that's gathered her in when she was half-asleep, or teetering at the breaking point.  As if some small part of life could be steady, dependable.  A lighted window amid the vast darkness she must tread.

Marita swallows and forces her eyes open.  Overhead, through the sunroof, high wisps of white scuttle across a rectangle of stark blue, thinning gradually as they go, separating and then reforming.  How like the ties in life, she thinks.

Granted, her desire to draw Mulder into a collaboration to fight this new enemy offers no clear indicators pointing toward success.  But Alex's plan seems laced with foolish bravado, or revenge they can't afford.  Perhaps both.  The old men's network is like a cancer, spread out below the surface, lying in veins and organs, lurking.  Cutting out one part of it--even the heart or head, if it were possible--won't kill it.  And what's left will rise to strangle the plan that's become her child, the only child she'll ever have in this world.  The one she's committed her life to.  When it come down to the choice between a man and your child, there's no question.   

Only hesitation. 

If only she could slow the world down.

Marita makes herself take a slow, deliberate breath, in and then out, and forces her fingers, one by one, to let go their death grip on the steering wheel.  She and Alex have barely talked since the rebel strike--a few hurried, static-filled phone calls.  Clarity is what's needed now.  She knows--as well as she's ever known anything--that he's dedicated to the success of her plan, to the salvation it could bring. Things could look different in person, the breakneck rush of events past. 

Glancing up again, she squints against the bright blue of the sky, then reaches for the door and steps out of the car, the echo of her pulse loud inside her.  Salt air blows her hair to one side and she looks up at the dark hulk of the ship, its shadow angled toward her.

Clarity, she reminds herself.  Her heart seems to bang against the thin fabric of her blouse.

Once aboard, she'll know what she has to do. 

 

 

End Part 7

 

 

 

 

  



	8. Chapter 8

NARRATIVE A

_Trapped like a rat: behind the scenes during the freighter incident_

 

What's the matter?  Your girlfriend dump you?

Not only had she dumped me; she'd ground her heel into me, and just at the point when I finally had all my cards lined up, as I was about to lay the winning hand on the table.

But I couldn't bring myself to believe it.  Maybe I couldn't afford to.  Marita would never do anything to compromise us; the program we'd been knocking ourselves out to put in place was not only her whole life; it meant our survival.  There was no way she'd put it on the line by trying something stupid.  So when I saw the Brit, my first thought was that she'd noticed him coming and hidden the boy to protect him.  It was simple: the Brit would want the boy, Marita would have hidden him, end of story.

Since I didn't know where the kid was and wouldn't have told the Brit if I did, he didn't waste much time with me.  He left me handcuffed to the wall, gave me one of his signature frowns and took off.  It was about 5:30 in the afternoon.  He didn't show up again until nearly 26 hours later, which didn't do much for the state of my only viable arm.  Or any other necessities; he would have liked it if I'd ended up taking a leak in my pants but I managed to hold it.  In the interim I'd been handed a lot of time to try and sort out what was going on.

I figured Marita'd be back to get me as soon as she was sure the Brit was gone; I held onto that theory for the first half hour or so.  Then I started to worry that something might have happened to her.  Maybe she'd stayed too close, the kid had made noise and the Brit had caught sight of them and caught them.  In which case I was up Shit Creek.  Granted, if they tried to interrogate the kid, the oil would get out into someone, but it wasn't going to knock out the whole group or their operation.  In which case they were going to hang me out to dry, and Marita wouldn't be able to lobby on my behalf without arousing the old men's suspicion.  And it would make no sense to give herself and the vaccine program up to save me. 

She hadn't given me access to that vaccine retrieval code; she'd talked about it the last time we'd been together, in Mallorca at Christmas, but for whatever reason it hadn't happened.  Now maybe that was for the better, because at least they wouldn't be able to get it out of me.  Though the question was whether they'd caught her, and if they had, whether she'd been able to convince them she'd been retrieving the boy for them and that she was still loyal to the group.  If so, there had to be some way she could eventually spring me, though my ties to Lev's camp were definitively cut now; there'd be no going back there.  But we had the vaccine; what more could I need in Tunguska?  Andrei had been my other resource at the camp, and now that connection was a piece of history, too.  I spent a lot of time studying the metal plates that made up walls and ceiling, warding off the image of Andrei swinging from the pipes in that interrogation room. 

I'd been up half a dozen times the night before with the kid, watering him down or taking him to the bathroom or doing whatever else it took to keep him quiet, so pretty soon, with the slosh and murmur of the ship, I drifted off, only to wake up about three hours later, shivering like anything.  My sweater wasn't much defense against the chill of sitting on a steel floor.  Aside from the cold and my aching arm, my first thought was that Marita might have taken pity on the kid and unsewn him to try to feed him or something, and if she had...

Fear snaked through me.  I hadn't had a chance to warn her about what I'd had done to the kid; we'd barely had time to talk, and I knew, if I thought about it, that it would likely be a pretty big point of contention between us.  At least until I had a chance to explain why I'd done it.  But without a heads-up she'd never suspect the Oil was inside him, much less realize that it could jump from one host to another.  And if it did, she was going to be its next logical host.  Where would it take her?  What would it do to her?  The stuff wasn't above leaving behind the people it had used like trash tossed from a car window.

My body ached, my butt was frozen and if I sat there much longer, the lack of circulation in the only good arm I had might result in some kind of damage I didn't want to begin to imagine.  I managed to get up and stomp around a while, warming myself as best I could.  Hunger was gnawing at me but I wasn't close enough to reach the pack that had the food I'd brought along, and I had to face the fact that something had gone wrong in a major way.  Marita would have been back for me long before now if she'd been able.  The old men knew where I was, but evidently they had more important things keeping them busy.  On the other hand, maybe it was a good sign; probably they were still chasing Marita and the kid.  If she was free, I could wait this out a while longer.

The ship rocked and groaned but nobody came, and eventually I fell asleep again.  When I woke up it was four in the morning and the thought occurred to me that the old men might be planning to just leave me here until I shriveled up and died.  But someone from the crew would come down eventually; they couldn't count on nobody finding me.  I thought about Marita and me three months ago in Mallorca.  We'd seemed closer than ever there.  Hell, there was no 'seemed' to it.  We  _were_.

The next fourteen hours repeated the pattern: fall sleep, wake up cold and hungry with my arm aching, and speculate about what had happened to Marita, when someone was going to come back for me... and what they'd do to me if it was one of the group and they'd caught her.  The thought that she might have taken the boy deliberately crept in slowly, partly because it made no sense and partly because I didn't want to acknowledge the betrayal that came along with it.  She'd objected from the start to handing the kid over to the old men.  Though, granted, she'd do it to save her program if she were backed into a corner--hand him over to prove her loyalty and then be in the clear to keep distributing the vaccine.  And she knew I'd have nothing to gain by outing her; destroying her program would be cutting off my own chances of survival.  I thought back to the way she'd come onto the ship: the challenge in her eye, the electricity that was practically jumping between us, and how quickly she'd been ready to head for my bunk.

To lead me to my bunk.

I ran the scene over and over in my head, looking for clues, but I had to admit the details once we were together were more than a little blurry, pushed into the background by the heat of the moment.  And I'd dozed off for a couple of minutes afterward.  I remembered seeing her stand up, start putting her slacks back on... She'd been kind of tight-mouthed at that point but I figured it was just from the possibility of somebody walking in; Marita hated the idea of being caught off-guard in any kind of situation.

It was the oldest set-up in the book--woman sidetracks man with sex and then takes off with whatever--and if I'd fallen for it... 

But what would make her do something like that?  If I knew anything about Marita, it was that she'd never do anything that would put her program at risk; she'd put too much into it, and beyond that her investment was woven through with her loyalty to her father.  So we'd been at odds over my plan to bring the boy here, but what was her idea? To take him to Mulder, of all people?  As if that would have gotten us anywhere.

Whatever had happened, I was going to have to find myself a way out of this mess, a way to escape.  I tried calling out for a while, hoping someone from the crew would come down and find a way to unlock me, but eventually I went hoarse, and my throat was already parched.  Nobody showed.  It reminded me all too much of the silo, pounding against the damn window while the lights went off and it began to dawn on me that the old man would be chasing everybody out and padlocking the place.

The Brit found me asleep, and threw me into a waking nightmare when he verified what I hadn't wanted to believe: that Marita'd taken the boy for herself and tossed me to the dogs in the process.  Not only that, but somehow the Oil had gotten out of the kid and into her, and now she was lying in a coma in some Consortium facility, the group's latest guinea pig.  I was... well, I was pretty much in shock.  There was no logical reason I could see why she'd take a chance like that, but regardless of that,  _she'd fucked me as a damn diversion and then run_.  If she had problems with the way things were going--concerns--she could have said so when she came aboard.  Should have.  But she didn't.  Not a damn word.  And now the old men were going to tear me apart. 

 _A goddamn diversion_.  Mulder ditching me when we were first partnered had nothing on this.

While I was still off-balance from the news he'd just given me, the Brit made his move.  He'd suspected for a while that Marita was up to something; he just hadn't been able to figure out what it was.  The fact that I'd been able to have the kid filled with Oil meant, he assumed, that I had an antidote and connections to a program the Russians must be running.  Therefore I must have access to more vaccine, and whatever it was Marita and I had been doing with it, he wanted in.  In exchange, he'd protect me from the group's wrath and shield our future activities from them.  The Brit puts on a pretty convincing air of civility, but when things get bad enough, he goes right for the jugular.

But there was something more urgent on the Brit's mind than his private assault on our vaccine operation.  There'd been another burning the night before, he said, this one on U.S. soil; rebels had attacked a gathering of colonist-tagged abductees in Pennsylvania.  My kid was dead, one of the victims, and there were descriptions now, from among the survivors, of what the rebel attackers looked like: exactly what the boy had described to me.  Can't tell you how that revelation turned my insides to ice.

Now, for as much as circumstances had put the Brit and me at odds on some things, survival hadn't ever been one of them.  Neither of us had bought into the rosy gospel of pseudo-salvation the board had been dishing up all these years.  If we acted quickly, there might be a chance to tip the Colonists out of their position of power by allying with these rebels, not because they seemed any more trustworthy than the colonists--the fact that they'd incinerated everyone in their path proved that--but in the hopes that the two sides would kill each other off or at least take their little turf war somewhere off-planet.

In a matter of a few days my life--and maybe the fate of this rock we all lived on--had taken a critical nosedive.  There'd been two attacks already; how many more would come?  How close together?   How powerful were these two factions?  And would our 15-year window to Occupation suddenly drop to zero, with an alien war in our laps and the victor taking--maybe devouring or incinerating--the spoils?  One thing was for certain: no vaccine was going to protect us from that kind of threat.

Our little chat was interrupted by a phone call.  The Brit didn't tell me who it was; he just pocketed the vial of vaccine I'd brought with me, unlocked me, shoved a gun in my back and took me out to his car.  He had his driver blindfold me, so I don't know where it was I finally ended up, but it was a room somewhere with a lock on the outside of the door and the window painted over.  He wasn't about to tell me where he was going or when he'd be back, and frankly, after the last 26 hours on the ship and the way things had turned out, I couldn't make myself care that much.  He'd come back when he came back.  In the meantime I at least had food, a bathroom and a bed.  I ate what they brought me, kicked a couple of holes in one of the walls and then lay down, hoping with everything in me for a little oblivion.  No matter what argument I made to myself, I couldn't figure out what Marita'd been thinking.  In the end, she hadn't given me the access code.  Had she been thinking about making this split--whatever crazy logic she'd used--for a while now?  Had everything in Mallorca been a lie?  If they somehow managed to kill the Oil in Marita, and do it soon enough, we could get the access code from her and keep the project going uninterrupted, though it seemed like a long shot.  If not... Maybe she'd left a copy of the code with Ansbach.  I'd just have to hope.

As I drifted toward sleep, the images returned to haunt me: Marita showing up in the ship's hold, the come-hither way she'd delivered that line about 'we've got them on the run', the way we'd gone for each other and how soon the kissing had led to my bunk.  Every last bit of it a fucking lie.  I told myself three, maybe four times not to dream about it, a message destined for my subconscious; it's not a completely foolproof technique, but it's surprising how often it can keep the worst stuff at bay.  Because the last thing I needed at that point was to wake up with Fake Marita doing a loop in my head.  Hell, I'd rather have had her come in and shoot me than do what she did.

The Brit didn't come back for me until late the next day.  We had a move to make, he said.  A rebel craft had crashed on the grounds of an air base, leaving one survivor.  The group was likely to want to hand him over to his enemies, but if we got to him first, we'd have a chance at returning him to his people, showing our willingness to make an alliance and distinguishing ourselves from the group.  Of course, we couldn't be seen trying to help him ourselves, which meant looking for someone else to do it for us. 

Which is where Mulder came in.  He was the Brit's idea, and for a minute I wondered if he'd been infected with whatever twisted logic had overcome Marita.  Why was anybody so convinced that Mulder could accomplish anything that involved getting his head out of his ass and taking clear-eyed, strategic steps that would help us survive?  But realistically, who else could we get to hunt down an alien flyboy?  Who would believe our story?  And because I was expendable and it would keep the Brit from having his disloyalty exposed to the group, I was elected to make the contact. 

Believe me, there was nothing I wanted less at that point.  Nobody I wanted to see less.  Well, except Marita.  But I had no choice.  Even setting myself up in his apartment, I just wanted to be away from there.  I did manage to knock him good when he came in; take my arm and see if you don't get a reaction from me, Mulder.  And yet there was something about seeing him again, even with his tired protests of righteousness and his predictable scorn.  Under the bravado he was shaken, off-balance, and what we were asking him to do, well, it was a crap shoot.  Whether he'd succeed, or bring down some kind of retribution we couldn't anticipate on himself, there was no way of knowing.  Alien factions were sitting just above the clouds; the planet could be toast tomorrow.  And this was the guy I'd always figured I'd have shared the fight with.

I did my best sell job, though he didn't seem to be buying it; the Brit'd told me how they'd been messing with his head and had managed to convince him that aliens were nothing but a giant hoax floated by the Department of Defense.  I have to admit it was weird seeing him laugh in my face, a convert to the ranks of alien naysayers.  But then this was what had always made Mulder such a risk; he was too easily led; if you flashed the right images in front of him, too easily convinced.  Too easy for the wrong people to convince. 

If only things had played out some other way, taken a different turn for one or the other of us a few steps back, to change the roles we were playing out now.

\----------------------------

SCENE: 180

_Post-*The Red and the Black.  By the end of this episode, Mulder and Krycek have both had their worlds upended.  In parallel journeys, each one must attempt to come to terms with the new realities of his life._

**Exterior, Mulder's apartment building  
10:58 p.m.**

The limo's lights flick on as soon as I'm down the front stairs.

I get in, close the door on the second try--damned dead arm--and finally slouch back into the leather, my head full of static mixed with snatches of Mulder's apartment: the smell of the place, the shadows, the way his eyes went big.  I want to be someplace far away from here.  A deserted beach would be nice. 

The Brit waves the driver away from the curb. 

"Where to?" I say, looking ahead.

"Did you succeed?"  That good old bulldog edge.  "Does he believe you?"

"Believe me?  How the hell should I know?"  When has Mulder ever believed anything I've told him?

I close my eyes.  A headache's building behind them, slow and methodical like some guy building a brick wall. Fuck, I don't need this.  But then nothing's looking good at this point.  I've seen the pictures: Skyland Mountain and Ruskin Dam.  They're Kazakhstan all over again.  Same deep burning, and the victims were all tagged, every last one of them.  It's not just some glitch like we were hoping; it's the opening volley in a gang war.  Hit your enemy's turf; take out his forces.  And if these rebels--or whoever they are--have any real strength, well, all bets could be off.  We could be looking at days or hours, not years, left with humanity sitting at the top of this food chain. 

"He'd better believe you," the Brit says.  I open my eyes.  He frowns and glances away.  "They made their decision without me, you know--handed over the rebel.  Fools.  Blind obedience worthy of--"

"Stalin's puppets," I say.  That kiss: where the hell had that come from?  "All of them afraid to step out of line.  They kept doing their jobs, hauling people in, making up charges, filling the prisons and the camps until they were arrested, too.  They saw it coming but they still--"  Insane. 

The Brit's eyebrows rise and he grunts assent.  Then he looks out his window and I look out mine and for a while we ride along in silence.

The look on Mulder's face was priceless.  I should've kissed him twice.  Big, stupid oaf.  Get it through your thick skull,  _bratishka_ : the world doesn't revolve around you and what you do or don't believe.  While you're out wasting your boundless energy soul-searching, the world as we know it is circling the drain. 

My gut tightens.

As if it's likely to make a whole lot of difference to you at this point, Aleksei, you sorry son of a bitch.  Marita's gone--like a knife in the gut, that one.  The boy's gone.  The vaccine.  Your painstakingly cultivated tie to the Russian program.  Every damn card you could have played.  A dozen steps from the finish line and here you are, pet monkey to a man whose lover you had killed, the old men's choke chain tight around your neck.

I picture that beach: flat, with the waves barely lapping below a hazy, colorless sky.  The kind of place where you collapse, too tired to think, and don't move even when you realize the tide is rising.

"Where are we going?"  I sit up and clear my throat, trying to make it sound like I still have some leverage.   

"It's late," he says.  "I'm taking you someplace you can spend the night."

 

 

**Near Wiekamp Air Force Base  
12:17 a.m.**

Maybe, Mulder thinks, he could lose himself in the abstract of dark-and-shadow flowing past the car's window, spin himself into some parallel universe and start with a clean slate.  Have a straightforward, respectable career for a change.  A 180-degree change.  As it is, he feels a thousand years old, worn and weary.  It's almost impossible to tell up from down anymore, or, more specifically, truth from--  

"What was it, Mulder?  What did you see back there?"

\--lies?  Delusions?  Meticulously crafted conspiracies?  Assumptions made and then bought too quickly, for the sake of--

Of what? 

It takes an inordinate effort just to open his mouth, the waking equivalent of the nightmare where for all your efforts you can barely move to escape the monster. 

A warm hand covers his own.  "Mulder?"

"Just... things we've seen before, Scully.  Things no one will believe."  The car rushes on, speeding toward the base and the requisite interrogation, the form denials, the inevitable call to the Bureau.  "Maybe the"--his voice fades--"the truth of a mad man."  His forehead wrinkles and he glances at her, sees her face soft with concern, open and unprepared.  "I saw... thought I saw"--deep breath--"a man like the one you described to Dr. Verber, Scully.  A man with no facial features."

She gasps; her eyes widen.  Mulder studies the back of the seat in front of him.

"The driver... I don't know where he went but the bounty hunter was there--the man we saw tracking Jeremiah Smith last year.  He wanted to kill the man with no face.  Then there was a bright flash and another faceless man with a stick, or a"--he glances up at her briefly--"a firestarter of some kind, was coming toward the bounty hunter.  After that--"  He pauses.  Finally he shrugs, bites his lip.  "Nothing.  America's finest were shining lights in my face and the others were gone, they--"  He drifts off, stares out into the rippling, abstract darkness and shakes his head.

Closes his eyes.  "Hey, you think we could call for wake-up service, Scully?  I'm ready." 

He's believed in extraterrestrials, disbelieved in them, come to be convinced of a completely earthly military conspiracy.

"I don't know, Mulder.  At this point I don't know what to say."

"Do you think it was some kind of... Could they have drugged me somehow, Scully?"

"How?"

"That's what I'm asking you.  Something Krycek could have done.  He--"  He pauses, flushes at the memory of Krycek's gritty cheek against his own, then feels along the side of his neck for any kind of patch Krycek might have put there.  The pads of his fingers find only skin.  "Never mind."

 

 

**Somewhere in Washington, D.C.  
11:26 p.m.**

The place the Brit takes me is obviously deserted, an old apartment building cleared of tenants, the smells of sweat and old paint lingering in the hallway.  The Brit's driver trails us up to the third floor, staying a few yards behind but making sure I can see the Glock he's got trained on me.  The Brit's gun is nestled against my back.  Guess I should be flattered by all the attention.

_Maybe the sleep you're getting is going to be the permanent kind._

Nah, he's just rubbing my nose in it, bringing me here; young pup needs to know who's boss.  He may not have any love for me but he's got no other ally now and he'll never get anywhere alone.  Granted, he might enjoy smacking me around the way Mulder does.  But it would break his bubble: he likes to think he's more civilized than that.  And in the end, he needs me. 

Much as I hate to admit it, I need him, too.  Marita's got information that could save us--could save hundreds of thousands of people if we can retrieve it--but they're not going to haul out the welcome mat for me at the consortium's labs.  If she even survives to tell anyone anything.  The thought of that kiss burns like the poison it was.

A pop rings out and I jump.

"Now, now, Mr. Krycek."  The sneer in his voice is obvious. I keep my eyes forward.  "It's only a water pipe." 

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

Go to hell. 

He can't afford to get rid of me.  Not with everything that's at stake. 

We stop at a door with '304' painted on it.  A knot tightens in my stomach.  The lock is on the outside. 

 

 

**Security office, Wiekamp Air Force Base  
2:40 a.m.**

"Mulder, what the hell is going on here?"  Skinner wears a particularly pronounced frown.

"It's a long story, sir."  Mulder slips away from the military guard and leads the A.D. toward a corner, keeping his voice low, confidential.  "The faceless man Agent Scully described, sir, from Ruskin Dam... I believe I may have seen one."  Words he wouldn't have believed himself saying two hours earlier.

"You're being charged in the escape of a classified prisoner," Skinner replies.

 _Classified as what?_   It would have made a good comeback once, but now the rejoinder sticks in his throat.  Besides, it sounds eerily like what Krycek said two hours earlier:  _not who--what._   "It's a lie, sir.  The driver was theirs.  He's gone.  What does that tell you?"

Skinner grunts.  Mulder glances toward the table where Scully sits, weary and glassy-eyed, staring at the wall on the far side of the room.   

"Can we get out of here now, sir?"

The A.D. scowls.  The corner of his mouth pulls, but he starts toward the officer in charge with his best Marine Corps stride.

Let him have it, sir.  Win one for Spooky Mulder, who only gave up aliens for Lent.

 

 

**Vacant apartment building, Washington, D.C.  
12:57 p.m.**

I guess the Brit figures this is the kind of dump I'm used to: old metal-frame bed, the kind with springs under a thin mattress; a five-drawer dresser in the corner--empty, I checked--and a yellow vinyl-seated chair that's straight out of some fifties time warp.  Stuffing's coming out of a rip in the seat back.

Gray-painted wood floor, bars on the windows and a closet with half a dozen plastic hangers on the floor.  The lights work.  Light: it's a single bulb.  All in all, fit for a king.

I can't sleep.

There's a hollow thrumming in my gut that won't go away, the kind you feel before a hit.  The Brit got word before he left here that the rebels have stolen their boy back, which is good for them, maybe good for us, too.  But the colonists aren't just going to let it pass.  They'll counter somehow.  Will the rebel threat convince them to scrap their timetable and take us now, before somebody else does?  Or will we end up as the battleground between two alien superpowers, flattened like ants at a picnic? 

This could be the last normal night this planet ever sees.

Mattress may as well be filled with ants for all the good it's doing me to lie here.  Finally I pull up, stand, end up at the window.  Run a finger along the dusty ledge.  Cars move along in the street below, oblivious of what may be lurking in the night sky overhead.  Traffic lights change, planes blink as they cruise the flight corridors--the pulse of a life I suddenly realize I haven't had more than one foot in for years.  I mean, how can you when you know what's coming? 

After all these years, all the dirty rooms and the double-crosses, the nights spent sleeping with my back to the wall, wondering if the wrong person will find me; all the jobs done to keep the old men and their plans safe, or to protect myself; if this is where it ends...

_Has it been worth it, Aleksei?_

I swipe at the web a spider's strung across the corner of the lower pane, then lean toward the glass, head coming to rest in my one good hand.  After everything I've survived, it's a hell of a way to end up: one ragged son of a bitch locked in a dirty room.  Going out with a bang would be easy; I've pictured it more times than I can count.  But this...

My eyes close.  The headache throbs behind them, steady as a heartbeat, while my mind, helpful as ever, serves up Andrei in his lab coat dangling from the ceiling of the camp's holding cell.  The man saved my life once. 

Bile burns my throat. I turn away from the glass and pace the room lengthwise eight, nine, maybe a dozen times, until the picture's gone and all I know is the rhythm of my stride. 

Back on the bed I curl onto my side, careful to stay on my spread-out jacket and avoid the dirty mattress.  The stump burns--I've been wearing the same socket liner for the last 36 hours--and I'm thirsty, but there's no way of telling whether the bottle of water the Brit left me is spiked with something.  I can wait. 

As I start to drift off, I find myself back on the ship, Marita whispering her 'we've got them on their knees' come-hither crap into my ear.  I roll to the side, put a fist through the rotting wall below the window and lay there panting.  After a few seconds I blink away the burning in my eyes and refocus: Kazakhstan seven months ago and a woman named Nika Forisova, an innocent  _krasavitsa_  dragged into the alien nightmare when her sister was abducted outside the city of Pavlodar.  We sit on an antique sofa and she serves tea in little flowered cups she inherited from her grandmother.  Family pictures cover the walls--several generations.  She has the face of an angel.

 

 

**Mulder's apartment  
1:13 a.m.**

The window blinds slice light and shadow into separate, stark layers, like geological strata.  Eventually one of them comes to remind Mulder of the beam of light that carried his sister away.

Or didn't.  But how can he tell?  If Kritchgau's evidence proved the memories false, does the refutation of Kritchgau's evidence restore them?  Or has the man's military-beyond-control theory been, in fact, refuted?  The recent burnings and Krycek's so-called rebel pilot might be part of yet a third layer of lies, an attempt to simply make him go crazy wondering which door to pick next. 

Time was when the truth had a distinctive feel to it, a kind of energy that drew him, like the clear, undeniable pull of a witching stick seeking groundwater.  And yet the evidence now, after all this: Kritchgau and the faked ice cave body, Scully's memories of Ruskin Dam, Krycek's intensity about 'going the way of the dinosaur'...

Krycek seemed to actually believe what he was saying.  Either he's a better actor than he's shown before or he was pretty damn shaken under that punk bravado of his.

But if Krycek is right and the military conspiracy is a lie...

Then it's possible the woman Old Smoky brought to the coffee shop a few months back was a fake, too.  She hadn't wanted anything to do with him, but wouldn't the real Samantha remember?  How could she forget all the times he'd been there to console her when his mom and dad had hit their stride and really gone at each other?  He'd always been her refuge.  Protecting Samantha had been the one thing that made sense when nothing else did.

Mulder pulls up and sits on the edge of the couch, head in hands.  He can feel, momentarily, the soft cheek of his sister as a baby, smells that sweet, fragile baby smell and knows the pressure of her arms' attempt to span him in a hug.  When the feeling fades, he looks up and sighs.  Then he gets up, pads into the bathroom, takes a piss without bothering to turn on the light.  Back in the living room he finds himself in front of the desk, staring out into the shadowed still life beyond the window. 

 _Two steps forward, one step back_.  He curls his fingers around the smooth wood of the chair back. _One step forward, six steps back_.  His fingers tighten; his eyes squeeze closed.   _Half a step forward, eight steps--_

He sees himself, cartoon-like, stepping backward off a cliff edge and beginning to tumble.  His sister, all dark braids and curiosity, peers down at him wide-eyed as he falls.

 

 

**Mulder's apartment  
6:58 a.m.**

Mulder grabs blindly, fumbling for the insistent ringing on the coffee table.  With relief he thumbs the button that makes the noise stop. 

"Yeah?" 

"Apologies for the early call, agent.  I just thought you'd like to know that the Air Force is dropping all charges against you."

Mulder pulls up at Skinner's voice, attempting to blink needed moisture into his eyes.  He runs a hand through his hair.  "Did they say why, sir?"

"Officially, they offered no explanation.  But I checked with a source who said it's been determined that the truck in question was taken without official permission.  All base personnel were accounted for.  None of them was the driver."  A pause.  "What does it mean, Mulder?  What's going on here?"

"I don't know, sir."  He shakes his head.  "I don't know what to make of it.  Yet."

Though Krycek might: the thought hits him as he switches off the phone.  He drops it absently beside him, then stands and stretches.  If Krycek was telling the truth--if there are, in fact, two alien races--then it would be just like him to play one off the other. 

Then again, what other option is there?  Neither side seems even close to having humanity's best interests at heart, Cassandra Spender's rose-colored impressions notwithstanding.

_He handed your gun back.  You could have shot him._

Krycek had to know he was taking that chance.  So maybe he  _was_  serious.  Maybe he's got a stake in this larger game and that's why he keeps showing up like heartburn after a spicy meal.  He always was an eager pup.  The specter of the world being taken over by swarming alien hordes could give a man that kind of motivation.  Though it's no guarantee Krycek can be trusted. 

Still, if someone were to decide he wanted to contact the guy, how would he go about it?  Assassins' Directory Assistance?  Tape a 'K' in the window?  Where do rats like Krycek hide?

The alarm clock sounds.  Mulder turns and frowns at it.  Finally he reaches to shut it off.  On the way to the bathroom he reaches to peel off his T-shirt but stops mid-stride and pauses.  He remembers Krycek's left arm stiff, dangling, and flashes unexpectedly on the interior of a Russian peasant cabin, the frustrated man whose truck he'd taken approaching him with a large knife.   

A shiver runs down his spine.  It propels him forward, but after a beat he pauses again.  Gingerly he reaches for the bottom of his T-shirt, using only one hand this time.  Pulling the hem upward, he stops to consider the dilemma of the intervening loose arm.

 

 

**Vacant apartment building, Washington, D.C.  
7:12 a.m.**

Well, morning sun's flooding the room like interrogation lights, so it looks like we're in for another spin around the old axis.  Headache's toned itself down to a dull thump, but I'm thirsty as hell.  I think my stomach would be okay if it had something in it. 

There's no telling when the Brit will show.  I was almost out last night when the thought hit me that he could try to torch the building while I was sleeping--my life for Charne-Sayer's.  But he needs me now.  They've shut him out by making that call behind his back, turning the rebel over like a bunch of fresh-faced schoolboys fingering the class cheater.

I sit up and grimace. All night I've felt the stump burning.  I opted to keep the arm on in case things suddenly got busy in here, but I can't afford to leave it like this any longer.  I slip out of the harness, work my shirt off and lay the arm aside.   _There anything you need, Alex? A washcloth, a few clean socket liners, maybe some skin ointment?_   Nobody thinks of the details.  They must assume the thing takes care of itself.

I shake a few drops of the Brit's water onto the dresser top and sniff: nothing that sends up a warning flag.  I run a finger through it.  Feels okay.  With my shirt on the dresser top, I spill some of the water onto one sleeve, then peel the soggy socket liner off the stump and toss it in the corner.  Carefully I touch the wet shirt to the stump and start to clean it.  Shirt won't be fit to wear later but that's the Brit's problem now.  If he doesn't want to walk out of this building with a shirtless, one-armed man to draw attention to him on the street, he can come up with some clothes for me to wear.

I set the shirt back on the dresser top, pour water on the other sleeve and dab at the tender skin again.

 _Mulder didn't shoot you_. 

Guess I was lucky.  Mulder could have blown my head off, or shot me in the leg and then used the thing to pistol whip me, take out all his pent-up frustration.

Maybe he was too confused to act, a deer-in-headlights kind of thing.  But then you've got to figure: nobody's been mindfucked like Mulder.  The old men have made an art form of twisting him into an emotional pretzel.  At least the road I've traveled has been pretty straightforward.  When they like what I've done, they pat me on the back.  When they set a bomb under my car, I know they want me dead.

Don't give in, Mulder.  Fight it. 

I spend the next few minutes rationing out the water and cleaning up the stump as best I can, trying not to think about the ships that could be waiting beyond the clouds, or the way it feels when the black oil snakes through you.  Or what the Brit might do to me if things go bad.  He may need me but it doesn't mean he's going to forgive what I did to Charne-Sayer. 

More than anything, I try not to think about Marita.

Eventually I hear footsteps in the hall outside.  Adrenaline kicks in and my blood starts to pound.  I could get a bullet in the head before I've had a chance to see it coming.  Or I could end up in a worse nightmare than I've already been through. 

Or maybe, by some crazy twist of chance, I'll live to see a few more minutes of blue sky between these clouds.

"Mr. Krycek?"

The lock bolt in the door slides and snaps.

Smile, Aleksei.  Suck it up and get your butt in gear.

\-------------------------

NARRATIVE B

_With the Well-Manicured Man: patching together an alliance... and a plan_

 

The Brit needed me more than ever now; I kept reminding myself of the fact in an attempt to douse my worries.  When he showed up to retrieve me, he told me Mulder'd taken the bait but the rebel had been stolen from the base and disappeared in some sort of interception from above.  The old men claimed not to have been involved and were trying to figure out which side had gotten him.

The situation wasn't looking any better than it had the day before.  And while the old men seemed content to stay where they were, trying, as the saying goes, to do the same thing but expecting a different result, the Brit and I were more than a little uneasy.  To one group or the other of the aliens we were going to be like targets, painted with white circles and a nice red dot in the middle, and what was the point of sitting around waiting for someone to draw a bead on you?  If the rebels made a serious strike, New York or D.C. would be the most likely targets, cities where their hits would take out critical infrastructure and communications capabilities, and retard human efforts to fight back.  Better to get out of Dodge and out of the line of fire, just in case. 

And if Armageddon was upon us, well, better to go out on our own terms.  That night we caught a red-eye flight to Denver, heading for the Brit's vacation home, a place I hadn't seen since I'd spent four weeks there recovering from what happened to me in the silo.

It was all a blur at first--a blur of travel, of trying to wrap my mind around the possibility that the world might end before the sun had a chance to set, of gray March skies streaking past the window of a plane and then a limo, a haze of drinking to escape the stuff in my head.  I'd known bleakness, but this was a whole new degree of it.  The tension seemed to hit the Brit physically, because he spent the next couple of days in and out of bed while I paced my room, slept too much and woke up to stare out the window, my pulse ticking away like a timed explosive hidden somewhere inside me.  What the hell had been the point of spending so many years running in place on this sorry rock, the bastard son of a high-placed schemer who'd been killed, in the end, by the group he created?  What had I accomplished for everything I'd gone through?

Letting myself think about Marita was like poking around in an open wound, but I couldn't keep from wandering back to the puzzle she'd left behind.  From what I'd seen over time, from what it seemed that we'd become, especially after the last time...  Hell, it didn't make a shred of sense what she'd done, but then letting it go around and around in my head wasn't going to change a damn thing.  The Brit kept his promise; he brought me a half-dozen glossy 8x10s of Marita lying in a bed in the group's facility to prove they actually had her and what her condition was.  It was all I could do to keep from ripping them up. 

In spite of our individual clouds of gloom and doom, though, the days dawned one after another and no word of new incidents came in.  The Brit paced beside his wall of family pictures and I spent a lot of time out hiking in the snow, anything to keep Marita and the possibility of fiery death from above out of my head.  Sometimes the rhythm of your own body, your breathing and heartbeat and the sweat of exertion, are the only things that will do the job. 

I guess it made sense, though, that my mind should wander to Dr. Carrie Phillips, the woman who'd treated me after the silo, and who'd taught me how to manage the flashbacks that hit me afterward with a vengeance.  Carrie and her son were... well, in the middle of an onslaught of pain and crazy terror, the two of them had been a welcome oasis of something I hadn't quite been able to define at the time, though I warmed myself at it the way a homeless man stretches his hands out to a bonfire. The kind of closeness or teamwork or whatever it was they had was something I had no personal reference point for, but it was pretty damn amazing.  The two of them sure as hell deserved better than what might be bearing down on us now. 

One day when I'd gone down into the town for supplies, I found myself driving past Carrie's building at the university.  Her car was parked outside her office and I could see Tyler's backpack in the passenger seat, but she didn't need to see me.  It's the kind of situation you think about in the theoretical: if you know something beyond your control is going to happen to somebody, do you tell them and let them spend what time they have with that knowledge hanging over them?  Or do you let them go on as usual, figuring they'll be better off not knowing?  Guess it's obvious which choice I made.

Once he was feeling better, the Brit was on me to comply with my end of our deal.  The sky still hadn't fallen; there'd been no new incidents, and if the threat was going to melt away and leave us back where we'd been before, we needed to get the hell back to distributing the vaccine ASAP.  So, having no other choice, I gave him the details of the program.  When he got over his initial shock, he said it made a certain kind of sense; Martín Covarrubias had been dragged into the the workings of the group against his will, and apparently he had a gift for connecting problems with the people who could solve them.  It only made sense that he'd use those skills to fight the group in his own way.

But I didn't have the access code to pick up the vaccine being manufactured in Cali, and I made that clear to the Brit.  He called New York, but Marita's condition hadn't improved much.  The Oil inside her had gone dormant and had come together into a single pool inside her body instead of being disbursed, but it wasn't dead.  Then again, you've got to figure: what I'd given them was a vaccine, not an antidote.  She was minimally responsive, certainly not in any shape to answer questions.  Which left us with two options if we wanted to move forward without delay: fly to Cali and try to talk Arizábal into handing over the vaccine without the code--a plan I didn't hold out much hope for--or contact Miguel Ansbach and hope Marita'd left the code with him.  Since that seemed like our best shot, and because New York was closer, that's where we went.

The Brit had tried to suggest, in one of our talks, that maybe it was the sight of what I'd had done to the boy that had spooked Marita into taking off, but it didn't make sense to me.  Sure, she wouldn't have liked it, but it's not anything she would've been ready to swap the safety of her program for.  Still, I couldn't help but dread facing Ansbach.  He'd appointed himself her honorary guardian after Martín died, and no matter the fact that she was the one who'd started this by running off with the boy, adding the Oil into the equation had been my doing.  I wasn't about to take the rap for Marita's choices, but I was going to need Ansbach's cooperation, not just now but over the long haul. 

Unfortunately, Ansbach didn't have the code.  Which started us looking in other places: Marita's apartment, her home computer, the one she used at her office.  I took the hard drives and had Ché go through them, but all he came up with were lists of contacts in cities on the distribution network--information Ansbach already had.  The worst part was going through Marita's Brooklyn flat, the secret place she'd never let anyone but me know about.  We'd spent time there and the memories stung something fierce.

No matter where we looked, we came up dry.  Which meant a switch to Plan B: a trip to Cali.  The Brit wasn't about to let me get that far away from him, so we went together.  We turned the apartment upside down, but there was nothing there except a bigger minefield of memories than I'd faced in her Brooklyn place.  It was a trick trying to keep my focus straight, to not give anything away to the Brit.  At FarmaCol I tried every argument, bribe and threat I could think of, but Arizábal wasn't moved.  Without the code, he wasn't handing over anything.  Our explanation that Marita was seriously ill and wouldn't be able to authorize a pick-up didn't move him, either.  Maybe if we could provide some sort of proof, he might bite, but we left Cali without having gained anything except a heavy dose of jet lag and, in my case, flashbacks to an encounter in a certain swimming pool that I had a hard time shaking.

The Brit dropped me in D.C., which suited me fine because I was tired as hell of having somebody breathing down my neck.  It had been a couple of weeks since everything blew apart and though I wasn't going to be able to break away from the Brit now that he had his hand in the vaccine program, I still needed some time to myself.  The last couple of weeks had been hell, with the kicker being that there were 12,000 doses of vaccine gathering dust in a FarmaCol warehouse, and more being manufactured that we couldn't get our hands on.  I headed for my place practically on autopilot, hoping for a good twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep and, if the fates were really smiling, to wake up and find that the last couple of weeks had all been a dream.

But I don't have that kind of luck.

\----------------------------

SCENE: OVERHEAD, THE STARS

_Two weeks after the confrontation in Mulder's apartment, an exhausted Alex Krycek returns home to find an unexpected visitor of his own._

Mulder shifts on the unfamiliar couch in the darkness, asking himself once again what he's doing here. He peers into the gloom: half a kitchen in the corner, a bookcase against the wall dappled with light from the street lamps. A bed, a small dresser: not much to show, considering the high-placed schemers Krycek works for. Beside the window a houseplant with limp, speckled leaves drapes its murky greenery from the edge of a spindly-legged table.

Obviously it's been a while since the son of a bitch was here last. And what's a guy like Krycek doing with a houseplant, anyway?

The apartment--such as it is--is warm and stuffy. Drowsiness rises around Mulder like a stealthy fog as his mind drifts back, an involuntary homing device, to the darkness of his own apartment two weeks earlier. He watches the strange tension in Krycek's face as he makes his little speech, listens to his clipped delivery, tight as if his voice were the fuse to a bomb. He can almost smell Krycek's sweat. 

Mulder pulls up abruptly, raises his head, scans the surrounding shadows. Reassured, he relaxes. There's nothing to learn here, nothing to indicate that Krycek will be coming. No reason to stay.

And what was it he'd planned to do if Krycek had showed? Throw his little 'resist or serve' drama in his face? Demand to know why all indication of warring alien factions had disappeared into thin air immediately after that night? Punch him?

As if it would do any good.

He should leave--stand up, stretch, take a last look around. Go home to his own couch; he and Scully have a meeting eight hours from now with an as-yet-anonymous soldier from Wiekamp Air Base. It's enough that he's managed to put the pieces together and find this place. Maybe that's all that drew him here--the challenge. 

But old profiling habits die hard. He recalls a long evening spent in John Mostow's apartment: shaping clay, studying sketches, filling his lungs with the very air Mostow breathed. If he sits here long enough, some part of him thinks, maybe he'll start to understand Krycek: what makes him tick, what the hell he's up to and why. Maybe he'll finally make sense. An understandable scumbag is always better than a scumbag you haven't figured out. 

Mulder's head dips forward but he catches himself, blinks and scans the shadows again.

  
  
~*~*~*~*~  
 

Dead tired, Krycek pulls the mail from his box in the lobby, shuffles quickly through it and tosses the lot at a nearby trash can on his way to the elevator. His good shoulder aches from the weight of his sports bag and his stomach is tight and empty. Jet lag looms over him like a panther about to pounce. The apartment in Foggy Bottom would have been a dream compared to this shoebox, but better the old men don't know about it. It leaves an option, anyway, when most of his possibilities these days range from zero to negative. 

A week with the Brit at his Rocky Mountain hideaway had been more than enough. If the end had come... well, if it had, it would have been as pretty a place as any to die: stark and clean and lonely with that burning blue sky. 

But nothing happened: no reports of tagged colonist pawns barbecued in the U.S. or Kazakhstan, no hellfire raining down on major cities, not even a UFO sighting in Podunk. Fewer sightings than normal worldwide, in fact. Which makes no sense.

Skirting a pile of phone books, Krycek arrives at the elevator. He raises the prosthesis, aims a synthetic finger at the 'up' button and pokes, then sags against the door frame. 

The Brit and his wall of family pictures had grown irritating as one day dawned after another, and more and more Krycek had found himself restless with the need to salvage what could all too easily become the final batch of the Cali vaccine.

It was Marita's original condition, her insurance policy against him somehow hijacking the secret vaccine distribution plan she'd laid out so carefully: two verifications for every request, her approval for every pick-up he'd make at FarmaCol's back door. Two weeks ago he'd been this close to having her relent and change it. She understood, finally, that he was in it for the long haul, and they needed a plan for contingencies. What if something happened to her?

This close. 

Then something had happened, all right. Who knew what the hell she'd been thinking, but she managed to throw away everything--maybe salvation itself. Traded it for a stint playing host to the black oil.

A shard of jagged memory makes Krycek swallow involuntarily but he quickly turns the movement into a clearing of the throat. Looking up, he sees the third floor indicator light still blinking. He jabs at the button again, then closes his eyes briefly, hoping to bring moisture to the dry burning behind his lids. What's done is done; Marita made her choices. Now, unless he can figure out a way to get to it, that batch of vaccine will represent twelve thousand potential lives down the drain, and who knows if that number will ultimately make the difference between survival and annihilation? 

Yielding to the nagging itch in his stump, Krycek rubs the fake arm carefully against the wall and hopes he hasn't already used his last clean socket liner. A moment later the elevator arrives and he steps inside. The bed in this place is about two steps above shelter quality, but sleeping men don't complain and the sack is going to be his next stop just as soon as he can peel his clothes off. 

He pushes the button for the fourth floor and glances at his watch. A few minutes to midnight; nearly 1 a.m. in Venezuela. He pictures Ruben Arizábal, their FarmaCol contact, just eighteen hours earlier, reserved but obviously disturbed at his persistence, and why wouldn't he be? It was exactly what Marita would have warned him of. No, he couldn't turn over the vaccine without Marita's authorization. Knowing Arizábal, he wasn't likely to budge. 

Maybe he shouldn't have broached it. Maybe he should have spent the time laying the groundwork to get someone else into the lab.

Or maybe the apocalypse will come tomorrow.

The elevator door opens. Krycek pushes himself away from the wall and strides out. The hallway seems to stretch on forever. Nearly a month since he was last here. Anything left in the fridge will be penicillin by now. 

His hand is shaky enough that the key misses twice before it slips into the lock. Turning the knob carefully, he opens the door. Warm, stale air spills out. He's already inside, setting the bag down and about to close the door behind him when he spots a shadowed form on the couch. 

  
~*~*~*~*~

  
"Mulder--"

No response comes from the sleeping man. Krycek shakes his head. He's set down his bag, opened drawers, checked the fridge, all without Mulder so much as stirring. If it weren't for the distinct possibility of waking up in a few hours with a gun pressed to his temple, he'd be tempted to crawl into bed and ignore his intruder.

" _Zasonya_." The Russian word comes out unbidden and Krycek shakes his head. He nudges Mulder's foot and steps back. "Wake up." 

Mulder grunts. Krycek tightens his grip on his pistol. The safety's on; this is no time for shooting. After a moment, Mulder's eyes open and suddenly widen. He reaches instinctively for his gun.

"It's on the table by the door. You can pick it up on your way out." Krycek pauses. "Look, how did you find this place, Mulder?"

"Grocery receipt," Mulder says, sitting up straighter, trying to clear the fog in his head. The realization dawning that Krycek isn't really threatening him, he allows the hint of a smile to curl at one corner of his mouth. "Found it in my apartment after your little visit; you must've dropped it. I tracked it to the place across the street." He nods in the direction of the little ground-floor grocery. "Wasn't hard to track a distinctive customer from there." 

"Fuck." Krycek lets out a sigh. What hasn't gone wrong in the last two weeks? "Look, go home, Mulder. I just got in from... off a fourteen-hour flight, and I'm tired." He turns, approaches the bed, pulls back the spread and sits down on the edge. He tilts his head to the left and then the right, stretching his neck muscles. "You need a better edge than you've got, you know that? I could've cleaned out this apartment while you slept and you would've woken up in the morning wondering where everything went."

"Haven't gotten much sleep lately, I guess. I keep thinking..." 

When he realizes that Mulder's voice has trailed off, Krycek looks up. 

"I checked out your alien rebel," Mulder says.

"I heard he got away."

"In a manner of speaking. I saw--" Mulder stops and shakes his head. "Maybe I still don't know what I saw," he says softly. He looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes briefly. "Your rebel was in a box in the back of a delivery truck. Scully recognized the driver from Ruskin Dam, but there was another man who came after the man in the box, with one of those..." He makes a stabbing gesture.

"To kill him."

"Yeah. Then everything froze; there was a blinding light... Next thing I knew, a couple of MPs were leading me away. Both men from the truck were gone."

"Last minute rescue from above."

"That's what I figured." Mulder leans forward. "What's going on here, Krycek?"

"Hell, I'd love to have somebody who could tell me." He'd laugh if it were funny. His voice drops. "All I know is that in the last eight or nine months before these burnings started there've been a series of abductions that don't fit the pattern. The colonists tag their abductees and drop 'em off again. These people"--he shakes his head--"are just disappearing."

"The rebels?"

"Could be. Could be something else. But yeah, that's my guess."

The room falls quiet. Krycek yawns and drowsiness settles over him. After a moment he stands, goes to the sink, fills a glass with water. He takes it to the window and pours it slowly into the houseplant's pot.

Mulder stifles a smile. Who would have thought to peg Krycek as the houseplant type? But something stops him from giving voice to his observation.

"Guy before me left this here," Krycek says as if he knows Mulder's mind. Two fingers drift absently over a speckled leaf. "Stubborn little bastard--refuses to die. Come in here after a while away and you'd swear it was a goner. Give it a little water and it comes right back." He turns and takes the cup back to the sink. It's time to shoo Mulder out.

Instead, he finds himself opening the refrigerator door and squinting against the sudden light. Seconds tick by and he stares at the contents. "There are a couple of beers left in here. You want one?"

Mulder hesitates, caught off-guard. "Yeah," he says finally, and stands. "Why not? It's been kind of hot in here, anyway." 

"It gets stuffy." Mulder has come up beside him and Krycek hands him a bottle. "There's a patio two doors down--roof patio. Not much, just a couple of chairs, but at least you can breathe out there."

Mulder nods. 

"Go on. I'll be out in a minute." He gestures. "Out the door, turn left. Under the exit sign." Then he crosses the room and disappears into the bathroom.

  
~*~*~*~*~

  
Mulder sits in an old plastic chair clutching his beer, looking up at the sky, occasionally glancing down to watch tiny beads of moisture break away and trickle down the bottle's brown glass. It's hard to believe he's here, that he's drinking Krycek's beer, that any of this is happening. Everything still seems slow and a little thick, as if it may all actually be a dream. Right now he could be asleep on Krycek's couch. Or on his own. 

Krycek was right. The patio is tiny, half-illumined by a weak yellow bulb on the wall. The two chairs--one faded red, one blue--are separated by an old metal table. Mulder glances at his watch. Krycek could be plotting something, setting him up somehow. 

But it doesn't feel that way. He puts the bottle to his lips, tips it and lets the sensation of liquid trickling down his throat verify that he's here, he's awake, he's thinking straight.

He stares into the night above the city lights, thinking of the abductions that have caught Krycek's attention. He considers the scar-seared face of the rebel alien from the truck, and Krycek's houseplant that refuses to die. Leaning back, he pictures Samantha's face overlaying the high darkness.

  
~*~*~*~*~

  
When Krycek opens the door to the roof patio, Mulder is staring at the sky. There's something awkward, a feeling of having lost their previous rhythm, and he wonders again why he didn't just hustle Mulder out the door instead of offering him his last bottle of beer. It's been thirty-two hours since he was last able to stretch out in a bed, not counting the few hours he spent tossing on the return flight from Bogotá.

Krycek clears his throat, moves to set his beer on the table and sits down. Mulder seems lost in thought, eyes upward. Krycek finds himself studying Mulder's silhouette, the contour of forehead, nose, chin. As he watches, Mulder's lips come together and his Adam's apple suddenly dips. 

"How do you do it?" he says, turning to face Krycek. His eyes are serious. Something fragile glints within them.

"Do what?"

"Look up. Look at the stars, knowing what's going on out there--what's coming?"

Krycek ponders, the rounded rim of the beer bottle smooth against his lips. He shrugs. "I just... I don't know. You do what you have to do." 

He tips the bottle and takes a swig. It's a stupid question. No, a stupid answer--a pat answer, empty. And Mulder's eyes are hungry for hope. "I guess... I guess you tell yourself whatever it takes. The stars--" He stops, mouth half open.

"What?"

"Nah." Krycek shakes his head. "Nothing."

"No, what?"

He glances up, past Mulder at the blue-black night. The corner of his mouth twitches. "At home, really old people will tell you that stars are the residue of the moon. That at the new moon, God takes the old moon and breaks it up into stars."

He stares into the shadows beyond his boots and takes a quick swig of the beer. It's a crazy folktale, a fable.

When he glances up again, Mulder is looking at the heavens, smiling. 

"I like that," he says, his eyes lit with quiet enthusiasm. "I've never heard that before."

Krycek shrugs and takes another drink from his bottle. It's been years since he was able to look at the night sky without something in his gut tightening.

"Star," Mulder says presently. "How do you say it in Russian, Krycek?" 

One eyebrow rises involuntarily. When has Mulder ever asked him a question and really wanted to hear the answer?

" _Zvezda_ ," he says finally, letting the familiar Russian sounds caress his tongue. He repeats it for good measure.

Mulder's forehead crinkles in concentration. He attempts the word, his 'z' and his 'd' too hard and distinct.

Amused, Krycek says the word again. It's obvious that Mulder is throwing himself into this, wanting to get it right. There's that look on his face--the kind he gets when he's discovered some new, as-yet-uncharted territory.

At some point in the back-and-forth of modeling and response, the steel-chain tension that's dogged Krycek since the night on the freighter begins to drop away. His neck and shoulder muscles begin to loosen. Stretching his legs out, he finds his mouth creeping toward a smile. A few tries later Mulder's pronunciation becomes passable and silence returns as the two beers are drained. Krycek smooths a thumb casually along the slick glass, studying the path it makes through the beads of condensation.

Mulder clears his throat. "I really ought to go," he says as he sets his bottle down. "Let you get some sleep."

Krycek grunts assent. They stand and Krycek follows Mulder through the door and down the hallway.

"Next time I'll knock," Mulder turns and says when he's passed Krycek's door.

"Next time I won't be here." Krycek works the lock on his door and opens it. "Can't have the world knowing where I live."

Mulder's mouth opens; there's a pause before he speaks. "But you know where to find me."

"Yeah." He watches Mulder turn and head toward the elevator. " _Do svidanya, bratishka_."

Mulder turns back. "Brat--"

"Get a dictionary, Mulder." Quickly he shuts the door. 

  
~*~*~*~*~

  
Lying in the dark, on the verge of drifting off, Krycek finds himself staring at the silhouette of his houseplant. Already it's showing signs of revival.

He's wondered more than once why he hasn't just tossed the thing. Like Mulder, it's always seemed to require care without offering any payoff. 

Or maybe not. 

Krycek rolls onto his side, bunches up the pillow and closes his eyes. Warm and slack, he waits for sleep to come.

\-----------------------------

NARRATIVE C

_Attempting to access the vaccine_

 

I thought about it later--going to Mulder, figuring out if there was some way he could help us out, because I had the feeling that this time he might actually do it.  But what we really needed was the vaccine in Cali, and there was no way Mulder could get that for us.  The group might get lucky and cure Marita and we'd get the code from her, but realistically it was a long shot.  We needed some kind of Plan B.  I thought of trying to place someone on the inside at FarmaCol who could release the stored vaccine to us, but that would be a one-shot deal; once the stuff disappeared, Arizábal would tighten his security.  Doing away with Arizábal wasn't an option; he was coordinating the entire production process.  If we could slip a scientist in, or bring somebody already there into the fold, we could get the formula and start again somewhere else.  But that would be like reinventing the wheel; it would take months and months.  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that getting someone who could release the already-produced vaccine to us was my best option in the short term, even if it only meant getting our hands on 12,000 doses.  Make that 24,000; that's how many would be waiting in the warehouse by the time I had somebody in place.

Naturally, the Brit was on board with my plan; he was as eager as I was to access the vaccine.  Miguel Ansbach seemed a little reluctant, though, or maybe just overwhelmed, given everything that had happened.  Added to his concerns about the distribution program, he'd just started a risky cold-based course of treatment on Marita, hoping, pretty much as a last resort, to try to kill the temperature-sensitive Oil without losing Marita in the process.

And me, I was going to be walking on eggshells.  I needed Ansbach's cooperation, but he wasn't ever going to believe Marita'd up and turned on me for no reason, and I was going to have to live with the fallout from that.  He was frantic to cure her not only because she had the code, but because she was like family to him--at least in his eyes.  And much as I would have liked to wipe Marita and everything that had passed between us out of my mind, it wasn't going to happen because I'd be hearing about every effort they made with her, every little change in her condition.  I'd just have to suck it up and do what I had to. 

So I spent a lot of time putting out feelers, looking for infiltration candidates, following up leads, setting up little tests to see whether people were trustworthy, checking backgrounds.  Did I mention that they either had to be Columbian or able to pass as a native of the region?  Needle in a haystack, but at least it kept me busy.  It kept me from thinking too much about how far I'd fallen, or the possibility of imminent alien invasion, or the Brit's little digs.  The honeymoon, such as it had been, was over, his bitterness over what I'd done to Charne-Sayer back close to the surface.  He wanted me to know I was getting my due for what I'd done.  His insinuations were wrapped up in that genteel exterior of his, but they were there all the same, little razor blades waiting to slit the skin.  I kept reminding myself not to get distracted, just to keep my eye on the goal, the way you pour your focus into pinning the crosshairs to a target at a hundred yards.

About two weeks after I'd started searching for potential infiltrators for FarmaCol, Ansbach scored his big victory.  The entity that had been pooled inside Marita expelled itself, finally dead.  For a week or so it was touch and go, but ultimately Marita stabilized and finally regained consciousness.  If we could get the access code out of her, I could drop this project I had going, but she wasn't coherent enough to talk, and who knew whether what she'd been through would have caused some kind of brain damage.  It would take time before we'd know anything. 

When I went looking for Ansbach a day or two later, I found out he'd taken off for a well-deserved break and flown home to Peru for a few days.  But the next time I saw him, he seemed as haggard as before.  They were waiting for Marita to regain a little more strength and coherency before they tried to get the information out of her, he said.  In the meantime he'd thrown himself into working on the topical vaccine in his off-hours.  I should have suspected something, but I took him at his word.

I didn't see too much of the Brit for a while, either, which was okay by me.  The group was busy with their hybrid project, probably showing off their hard work to the Colonists and kissing ass to highlight their loyalty in the face of the recent Rebel attack, while at the same time a contingent of their tech guys was searching for any sign of more rebel incursions.  But the attacks seemed to have stopped cold.  It would've kept me awake nights--okay, it did for a while--the feeling that they were just regrouping and waiting to hit us again, but if they did attack, in the end there was nothing I could do about it.  Better to keep focused on something that might get me some results, so I continued to work away at my little project.  I had three potential candidates to infiltrate FarmaCol and needed to narrow it down to two. 

Three weeks later, the Brit and I got together.  He'd just come from Fort Marlene and he wasn't happy.  He'd talked with Marita the day before to find out what she knew, but she'd seemed to only vaguely recognize him.  Evidently she was coherent enough to cover herself, though, because later he found out that earlier in the day she'd told a couple of visiting elders she'd taken the boy to keep me from manipulating the group.  Right: good old loyal Marita.  Anything for the organization. 

Well, as far as they knew. 

So the Brit had gone back and had Miguel inject her with something designed to elicit a little more unfiltered information, but he didn't find out anything new.  And no access code.  It was a letdown, but what wasn't these days?  I shrugged my shoulders and went back to work.

By this time I'd narrowed it down to one guy who I figured really fit my requirements for the FarmaCol job.  But halfway through going over the final details of his assignment, the fucker up and vanished.  I waited a few days, hoping he'd surface, but eventually I resigned myself to having to track him down.  All I found was a room he'd rented, vacant.  At the back of the closet was a single T-shirt I'd seen him wear a couple of times.  Everything else had been cleared out.

Like a sucker punch, I hadn't seen it coming.  At all.  I went over and over our meetings in my head, looking for clues, but I couldn't pull up a single red flag.  The more I wracked my brains over it, the more I just wanted to shoot something.  Actually, I did go to an indoor range that afternoon, and I put one hell of a lot of lead through a half-dozen targets.  Shooting can be great stress relief, but this time it didn't help the way I'd hoped it would.  Then again, there was no way it was going to change the hard facts: I was back to square one, a couple of months completely wasted, the vaccine still locked away.  Marita'd survived, but if she had the access code in her, she wasn't giving it up. 

And who knew what the hell the damn Rebels were up to, how soon they'd strike again?  They'd beat the Colonists in the last encounter, a fact nobody seemed to want to face.  They'd gotten their man away from an alien enforcer, and everyone knew the Bounty Hunter was stronger and had more powers than any other alien we knew of.  Even if by some chance we defeated the Colonists, we might just find ourselves lined up against a stronger enemy. 

I wasn't sleeping well, and I'd started having stomach pains at night.  Somebody I mentioned it to said maybe it was an ulcer.  I had to laugh.  Cut down on the stress--isn't that what they always told you?  Like that was going to happen in my lifetime.

I went to report to the Brit only to discover that he was out of town.  He never went anywhere without telling me--or at least checking in to give me one of those steely-eyed gazes and let me know I'd better keep myself in line while he was away.  I should have realized then that something was up, but my mind was hung up on my MIA operative, on what I'd like to do to him, and on generally trying to scramble up the down staircase

In a crazy stroke of luck, within a few days I stumbled across somebody a lot better suited for the FarmaCol job than my previous guy. I put Raul Cisneros through a lot harder training, but he handled it well and in the end I felt pretty confident about him.  Eventually we flew to Cali, spent some time snooping around, finding out who worked in the warehouse.  Got buddy buddy with our target and offered him a whole lot more money than he'd ever seen before to tell his employers he'd had a sudden family emergency and desperately needed a couple of weeks off, but that he knew of someone capable who could fill in for him while he was away.  Raul was gone for a good half hour talking with their HR people; I figured he was in for sure.  And he almost made it.  But when they went to have Arizábal sign off on him, all of a sudden they decided they could get by with the personnel they already had.

I wanted to put my fist through Arizábal's face and squeeze him until he agreed to hand over the goddamn vaccine, but I knew that even if I succeeded, he'd alert the authorities and we'd never make it out of the country with the stuff.  Worse, the vaccine and our program would be exposed, and that was something we absolutely couldn't afford.  Getting to Arizábal would mean tracking down his family, knowing exactly who to threaten and how.  It would take time and careful prep work.  I retrieved Cisneros and headed back to New York. 

But if I thought I'd hit bottom, I was in for a big surprise.  While I'd been away, something had come up that nobody could have foreseen.

\---------------------------

SCENE: THE TRUTH

_The Well-Manicured Man is forced to give up a secret, sending Krycek on his personal mission from hell._

 

It's nearly midnight by the time I arrive.  A butler answers the door and takes me down a long hallway to the study. The Brit's house is high-ceilinged and gloomy, lined with dark wood paneling that blends into the shadows of the late hour.  Not anything like his Colorado place: this one looks like a transplant from England, which I guess makes some kind of sense.  The Brit's sitting in a wing chair beside a lamp that spreads a pool of light into the gloom.  I don't even make it to a chair before he starts in.

"Something's come up," he says, a frown stamped deep into his face.  He leans forward and the lamplight tints his skin a warmer color. 

Nice to see you, too. _How've you been, Alex?  Tell me about all the time you spent busting your butt trying to slip someone inside FarmaCol._   No?  Didn't think so. 

"Must have, at this hour," I say, taking a seat.  I put one leg up and let my ankle rest on the opposite knee.  "What's this about?"

"Children," he says.  "Geniuses, to be precise." 

For weeks he's left me on my own to figure out a way to access the stockpiled vaccine, but now he up and calls me in the middle of the night to talk about a bunch of little eggheads? 

The Brit lets out a sigh and sinks back into the chair, setting aside the cup of tea he's been nursing.  "The Project has taken an interest in a certain group of young people who have the potential to provide us with invaluable data for the hybrid proj--"

"Guinea pigs."

He frowns at me.  He hates it when I cut past his civilized facade. 

"Yes," he says after a pause.  "At any rate, it will be easier, when we need them, if these young people haven't been in the public eye. So we've endeavored to guide them in directions that will maintain their anonymity."

"How's that?"

"We've created enrichment groups for them, places where they can go and try a variety of challenges, and where they can relax in the company of others like themselves."

I force a smile.  Gotta love the syndicate, showing so much empathy for a bunch of poor, misunderstood kids.  "So the problem is--?"

"Diana Fowley has been monitoring the various groups for us.  Recently one particular boy came to her attention.  He's clearly got an advanced level of psychic ability.  Frankly, it appears to be much greater than anything we've seen before."  His voice drops from informational to serious and his eyes get that steely look.  "She's convinced he's been reading our operatives there.  The situation could pose a serious threat to us."

"What?  She figures he could be going through their heads like unlocked file drawers?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"How old's this kid?"

"Twelve."

So what do they think he's going to do with the information?  Find somebody to sell it to?  He could, but even a kid genius is just a kid.  Who'd believe him?

I clear my throat.  "And this concerns me how?  We've got problems of our own, in case they'd skipped your mind: 24,000 doses of liquid gold gathering dust in a warehouse in Cali.  You haven't even bothered to ask me about that.  For that matter, where the hell were you two weeks ago?  You skipped town and didn't even leave me a note."

The Brit leans forward into the light.  Irritation shows in his eyes.  "It concerns you because you were nearly chosen to eliminate this boy."

"I don't take out kids."

"You  _were_  chosen.  You would have had no choice."

"Have Powell do it."  Roger Powell the spook.  In more ways than one; guy gives me the creeps.

"Conveniently, you were out of the country," he goes on.  "But I had to put myself on the line to cover for you."  A glare for good measure.  He pauses.  "They did ultimately select Mr. Powell, but things have taken an unexpected turn.  There was a chess match earlier this evening--"

I pull forward.  "Klebanov?  That was Powell?"  I almost laugh.  "He killed Klebanov?" 

"By mistake."

I heard it on the radio on the way over.  Figured it for some sort of payback coming from Mother Russia.  "Fuck."

"Unfortunately Powell was apprehended not far from the arena.  The FBI has already opened an investigation, which will have to be carefully managed, and the boy remains alive and is still in their hands."  The Brit pauses, and after a beat or two goes on, his tone a little different now--something in it I can't quite read.  "I'm afraid the complications are more serious than we could have anticipated.  The one man who could have finessed this investigation with the greatest degree of mastery is no longer among us."

My mouth drops open.  The Brit's waxing nostalgic about the old man?  "He deserved what he got," I say, checking my impulse to spit on the obviously expensive carpet.  "You think he was in it for the group, or for the mission?  If you do, you're delusional.  He was in it for himself.  No one else."

"Yes, well"--he clears his throat--"be that as it may, he displayed a foresight the others never have.  He had connections--means--the rest of us have never managed to duplicate."  He looks straight at me and presses a buzzer on the table.  A few seconds later the butler appears. 

The Brit hands him the tea cup and saucer.  "Thank you, that will do.  For now."

It dawns on me that this is a display, a statement that we're not alone here.  As the butler leaves, I make out a slight bulge at the side of his waist.  An inside-the-waistband holster, but not the most discreet one in the world.

"What the hell is going on here?" I ask, setting my foot back on the floor in case I need to get up in a hurry.  A low-grade tension starts up inside me.

"I'm not overlooking the danger he presents, or his self-serving nature," the Brit goes on.  "But we ignore at our peril facts we may not like."  He seems to steel himself.  "He's alive." 

My heart twists, a wrenching skipped beat.

"My dissatisfaction with him was as deep as anyone's," the Brit's saying, the sound muffled behind the blood thundering in my ears.  "And yet I felt that getting rid of him might prove to be a rash decision.  It can be worse than imprudent to divest oneself of resources that may yet prove valuable."  A pause.  "Which was precisely my thinking when I plucked you from the depths of a certain missile silo in North Dakota."

"Where?" I manage, my voice a dry rumble.  "How?"  He thinks he can beat the odds, that he can handle a poisonous snake without getting bit.

"Canada.  In the Laurentian Mountains two hours north of Quebec.  When the decision was made to terminate him, I rushed to his apartment.  He'd already been shot.  He was near death, but I managed to get him away to a private facility."  He pauses.  "It was touch and go for many weeks, but he's a tenacious old buzzard."  There seems to be the hint of a snarl in his voice.  "He's been in a cabin in the woods these last many months, recovering his strength."

"And the others?  They don't know?"   _Alive_.  I picture the Brooklyn flat, waking up to footfalls in the middle of the night, Marita arriving to tell me she'd gotten word that he was dead. 

From the Brit.

"No."  He shakes his head and sits up straighter.  "But they will soon enough."

"Marita knew this?"  The wound's scraped raw again.  Was she in with him on it?  How far back did it go?  Was she playing me even then?

"No," he says.  "I confided in no one.  Just as I never told anyone about you."  A pause.  "You must go there, bring him back.  No one else is going to be able to turn around what this mistake over the boy has turned into."

"Find somebody else."  Not if he were the last man on earth.

"I can't be seen as having been the one to save him.  He's agreed not to mention me.  You're the most plausible one to have had contact with him--"

"Yeah, if nobody remembers what he's tried to do to me."

"The others know nothing of the details of either of those incidents."

"Yeah, well, for some reason I remember them pretty damn clearly."

"The fact remains, Mr. Krycek, that we need his expertise and his connections to diffuse this situation.  Keeping the group from exposure can mean security for you and I and our vaccine project as well."

"Kill Powell," I say, leaning forward, not missing the way he's characterized the vaccine project.  Like he's the one who's taken the risks.  Made it work.  "Without the shooter, they've got no leads, no trail leading back to the group."  I shrug.  I could go to Quebec, kill the old man myself.  It's not like I haven't pictured the possibilities a thousand times in my head.

"There's still the matter of the boy."

"How hard can it be to steal a kid?"

The tone of the Brit's voice changes.  "With the paranormal angle, I expect Mulder and his partner will be eager to investigate the boy's powers."

"If they find out about him." 

But I know already I don't want Mulder sticking his finger into this pie.  The last thing I need is to end up at odds with him.  It was like we actually connected the last time we crossed paths.  Okay, maybe it was just a rope bridge tossed across the chasm, but it was something.  Something I might need one day.  Besides, I don't want to sidetrack Mulder.  If he's doing anything to find out more about the Rebels, I want him to keep at it.

"There's more, unfortunately."

I refocus on the Brit.

"He's become rather more active than I would have liked during these last few months."  Another pause.  "He's been corresponding with Diana.  Actually, I first heard about the problem with the boy through him.  He's managed to influence several personnel decisions within the FBI as well."

"You save a snake, you can count on him striking back."

"Mm, yes, unfortunately.  But I believe he can still be valuable.  And given the realities of this current situation, I believe it would be more prudent to have him here, working where he's relatively visible.  Where he can be watched."  Two fingers settle against his chin.  "I'm convinced there's something he hasn't told us--something he's held back from the group all these years.  I believe he may have some sort of edge, a hedge against the future."

Something I've been convinced of for years. "Wouldn't surprise me."

"I want to know what it is." 

It could be the ultimate payback--to expose the old fucker and steal his precious secrets.  Though the idea of having to share space with him on this planet again, to breathe the fouled air he breathes...

Even on the plane, and then aboard the chopper, sandwiched in next to the rookie the Brit's sent along with me, I don't know what I'll do when I get there, whether I'll be sitting next to the old man on the return flight, wracking my brains for a way to unlock his secrets, or whether I'll just end it at the cabin--shove three inches of cold Beretta steel in his mouth and pull the trigger. 

I try to fight it but my mind keeps drifting back to that night, Marita coming in at 4 a.m. with her news, both of us trying to wrap our heads around the report of the old man's death, each of us thinking it was too good to be true but hoping all the same that it was.  I feel her spooned in front of me, her skin just starting to warm up.  I remember that she pulled my arm around her waist and when she finally spoke, she said she'd thought it would feel different, that having him gone would change things, but it hadn't; the future was still bearing down on us, our path just as risky as ever.

At least she wasn't lying to me: the thought keeps coming like the faint sound of a bell ringing in the wind.  As if it makes a damn bit of difference now.  Maybe it's just the only thing I can find to hold onto as the chopper drops to skim lower and lower over the trees.  Obviously we're near our destination.  I picture the old man's smirk, the smoke rising from his lips, the casual way he waves his hand to discount something--a theory, a strategy or his own flesh and blood.  The knot in my gut tightens, and as the cabin comes into view I struggle against the drowning feeling that rises around me.

I reach for the solid steel comfort of my gun, press my thumb hard against the jutted-out ridge of the slide release until the pain brings me clarity.  Get ready to jump, Aleksei.

\-------------------------

BONUS: EXCERPTS FROM THE DIARY OF THE WELL-MANICURED MAN

_Behind the scenes between The Red and the Black and The End, complications abound._

 

**26 March 1998**

In a very propitious twist of fate--if anything these days can be said to be propitious--I found Alex Krycek. Caught him, actually, before he had a chance to sabotage the group. I've told the others I'll take charge of him, which will give me a chance to seek below the surface. And Krycek and I have always had our ties--sometimes regrettable, but in the end necessary.

How alike the two are, father and son, in spite of their hatred for each other. Both calculating, determined, neither waiting for the game to catch up to them but always three steps ahead, scouting out their possibilities. Alex has asked me the details of his sire's demise, though only, I believe, to reassure himself that Spender is indeed dead. I believe I gave him enough to put his mind at rest, though I worry about what will happen at such a time as it may seem necessary to return Spender to the group.

And Alex himself: I've been quite surprised--impressed--by the operation he and Ms. Covarrubias have devised. Or put into operation at least; Martín's creation of the initial network comes as no real shock. It could prove to be the savior of us all if only Krycek and I can discover the access code for retrieving the vaccine currently being manufactured.   
 

**9 April 1998**

We flew to Cali in an attempt to reason with Ms. Covarrubias' contact there--but to no avail. Her confidant at the lab, Dr. Ansbach, didn't have it, either, though I suppose he should be watched; if he did have the code, he wouldn't be likely to offer it to Krycek given Ms. Covarrubias' rejection of him. I didn't see Krycek's Russian boy myself--at least, not while he was alive--but the remains show evidence of stitching around the eyes, mouth and ears, a sight which no doubt would have shocked his erstwhile accomplice. I wonder what else was involved in her decision to part ways with him.

I've taken it upon myself to have a listening device planted in Mulder's apartment, and another in his office, though apparently I was too late to discover anything he might have known about Ms. Covarrubias' desire to ally herself with him, which was, according to Krycek, the point of contention between them. Mulder hasn't made any inquiries into what happened to her as far as I've been able to determine, though he's unaware of the larger series of actions that have transpired around the incident of her infection and may know only that she tried to phone him.

At present, Alex continues his work toward planting an employee within FarmaCol who will be able to funnel the vaccine to us. Marita has been in a holding state, the oil continuing to rest in a pool within her body, apparently inert but still alive. I intend to talk to Dr. Ansbach about anything we might give her to bring her around long enough to obtain the retrieval code from her, but until she regains some semblance of consciousness, I assume this will be impossible.

  
**13 April 1998**

Dr. Ansbach continues to search for ways to defeat the alien virus inside Ms. Covarrubias. I took the liberty of following him one day when he left the lab, just on a hunch, and tracked him to a Peruvian import-export business in Brooklyn, which, after more observation, I determined to be a habitual destination for him. Entering a few minutes behind him recently, I inquired after him but was told they knew of no one by that name. The following day I intercepted him outside the establishment, and he somewhat reluctantly took me upstairs. Evidently he's doing additional research on strategies to assist Ms. Covarrubias in his spare time. He said he didn't want to appear too attached to her on the job for fear it would jeopardize his position, though I suspect that he may be working on more than just a cure for her specific case.

  
**24 April 1998**

Ms. Covarrubias' condition has improved markedly since Dr. Ansbach undertook a series of somewhat risky attempts at killing the virus through a novel low-temperature therapy he'd devised. There were times when it appeared she would not survive the treatment, but in the end she has pulled through. Given his longtime relationship with her father, no doubt he was very careful about approaching that fragile edge. At this point the virus is dead and has been expelled, and Ms. Covarrubias is awake for short periods, though still very weak. Dr. Ansbach has attempted to get the necessary code information from her, but as yet has been unsuccessful. I've inquired about the possibility of giving her something to make the memory surface, but he maintains that it's still too early, that we don't want to risk some sort of adverse reaction at this still-fragile stage of her recovery.

  
**8 May 1998**

In an attempt to determine whether Dr. Ansbach is being completely straightforward with me, I went to see Ms. Covarrubias unannounced and found her propped up in bed, weak but in a coherent state. Evidently the others had already sent someone in, because she protested that she'd 'already told them everything that happened.' She seemed to only vaguely recognize me, but from what was put forth in the board room later that day, she is--or at least was, at the time--coherent enough to cover herself, claiming that she stole the boy from Krycek to neutralize his ability to manipulate us. The call to the Bureau from the phone booth she claimed was directed to our man Frost in case Krycek should catch up with her before she reached us. His office records show no call from that number, and A.D. Frost was away from the building at the time, though I suppose she could have misdialed in her haste, or the call, if she made one, could have been routed improperly.   
 

**19 May 1998**

Drugs given to elicit the vaccine retrieval code have produced no results, and as Ms. Covarrubias is fairly tightly monitored, the opportunities to attempt this present themselves infrequently. Krycek likewise has been unsuccessful so far at being able to place a man inside FarmaCol who can release the vaccine to us; the one he'd been grooming for the mission recently disappeared without a trace and Krycek is beside himself over the time lost. He's already seeking out a new candidate in the hopes of being able to infiltrate the facility by mid-June.

  
**8 June 1998**

I've visited Spender in Quebec and discovered that he has been rather more active than I would have liked in ways, unfortunately, that have nothing to do with his recovering health. He's been corresponding with Diana, who has warned him that there's a boy being watched by the high IQ monitoring project who is cause for concern. It's not just a matter of visibility, though this particular boy has indeed entered the public eye as a chess prodigy; thank goodness the suggestions placed before the other parents have succeeded in keeping their children out of the limelight--hopefully for the duration, until they reach the age where they'll make suitable test subjects. This particular boy shows evidence of profound telepathic abilities, and Diana is afraid that he's begun to read the mind of our operative who interfaces with him.

The danger of exposure, it goes without saying, could be extreme, and raises the dilemma of what to do about him, but beyond that there's the critical question of raising the subject in the board room with its attendant question of where the information came from. Diana has not notified the board about this, so I fear I'll have to have a talk with her and urge her to do so in order to keep Spender's name out of it.

  
**15 June 1998**

The board's attempt to eliminate the threat posed by the Praise boy has unfortunately ended in failure; worse, our operative was caught and local authorities are beginning to investigate. Diana is returning to Washington, ostensibly to help divert attention from the boy, especially if Mulder should become involved, though I fear she may also have come as Spender's eyes and ears, a prelude to an intended return to wielding influence over the group. Much as I'd rather he remain where he is, the only practical move now would seem to be to return Spender to New York--present him as the man to take care of the matter surrounding the boy and then at least to be able to observe him at closer range, where he's forced to work, at least to a greater degree, out in the open.

Of course, this means having to divulge to Krycek that Spender is still alive, a fact that will hardly endear him to me. Even less so if I assign him to perform the retrieval. Of course, he may well shoot Spender rather than bringing him back... which would be a turn of events not without its advantages at this point. Besides, it will give me a better idea of Krycek's loyalties; that in itself could be valuable information.

  
**16 June 1998**

My, but Krycek was furious to know of his father's continued existence. He wanted no part of the trip to Quebec, but in the end agreed to go along with another operative. Now to see if he returns with Spender in tow. I've informed the board that I've been contacted by someone who has the capability to help us, but as yet I haven't told them who it might be.  
  
An investigation into the Praise incident has been opened by the FBI and there's not a moment to waste.

 

End Part 8


	9. Chapter 9

BONUS: AT THE CABIN

_Alex Krycek and CSM in the snow in Quebec. Missing scene from Season 5's The End. Not originally intended as part of the story itself, this was written as background in order to explore what might have gone on between Krycek and CSM in the snow at the cabin after the cameras turned away._

 

KRYCEK: I was... sent to bring you back.

CSM: (takes a few seconds to process this)  So they want me back, do they? 

He smiles, but Alex, who has relaxed his stance, raises his Beretta again.  CSM's face shifts to a neutral expression. 

CSM: It will take me a few minutes to gather my things.  I assume you have transportation?

KRYCEK: (nods toward the crest of the hill)  Over the hill, in the clearing.

CSM:  (lifts his hands in a kind of shrug)  Well, I'll start packing then.

KRYCEK lowers his gun and follows, his heart still pounding.  At the cabin he stays outside, wanders off to take a leak against a tree and then goes over to inspects the body of the junior operative who was sent with him.  As KRYCEK expects, the man is dead.

Five minutes later CSM emerges from the cabin with two bags and a backpack.

CSM: We could make in one trip if you wouldn't mind carrying--"

KRYCEK glares at CSM, which shuts him up.  The last thing he wants now is to reveal that he's lost an arm, and he needs his good hand for the gun.

CSM: Well, I--" (he bends to try to collect the three bags)

KRYCEK: Give me the pack.

CSM shrugs and hands it over. 

KRYCEK waits for CSM to pick up the two bags and start off.  Then he sets the gun on the window ledge, slips the pack carefully over his bad shoulder and picks up the gun again.  He trudges off after CSM.

Later, at the crest of the hill, before they head down to the chopper:

CSM: Have you been authorized to tell me what occasions my return?  I assume they have a problem they need me to fix.

KRYCEK: It's about a kid.  A telepath.

CSM: Yes, I've heard about him.  He's causing trouble, is he?

KRYCEK: They'll explain it when you get there.

CSM gives him a look, trying to figure KRYCEK out, then shoulders his bag and continues toward the waiting helicopter.

They get in; the chopper lifts off.  Both men study the hillside they're leaving.  Beyond the cabin, KRYCEK sees a single arm of the man who accompanied him on the last flight.  They should have moved the body, he thinks--dragged the guy off into the grove beyond the cabin and buried him in the snow, but he couldn't have done it alone, and asking CSM to help would have revealed his problem arm.  CSM didn't mention anything, though, so he must not figure there will be much of a problem when the body is discovered.

For most of the flight the two are silent, but as they approach Quebec, CSM, figuring it will be even less prudent to speak once they're on a commercial flight to NYC, breaks the silence.

CSM: I hear you've been with the group for several months.

KRYCEK: (shrugs)  It works for now.

CSM: There's a time to be about your own business and a time to join with others.

KRYCEK continues looking out the window.

CSM: You've survived a lot.  That's good.  It shows fortitude.

KRYCEK: (turns toward CSM)  Or luck.

CSM:  Yes.  (A pause.  He thinks about Morleys; he hasn't had a cigarette since he was shot.)  You're capable of more, you know, Alex, than just being their errand boy.

KRYCEK: That's rich coming from someone who locked me in a frozen missile silo.

CSM:  Things change.  Power and influence are constantly rearranging themselves.

KRYCEK: I've got plenty to do.

CSM: I wasn't making an offer.  (He pauses, then decides not to say more.)

KRYCEK turns back to the window.

\----------------------------

NARRATIVE A

_The reality of having CSM back in the consortium starts to sink in as the Gibson Praise affair sets off a series of unanticipated events._

 

The old man was surprisingly quiet on the flight back, which suited me fine.  It was bad enough having to sit next to him, to see him alive and watching everything around him the way a cheetah eyes prey.  He made one crack at the beginning, before we left the site, about how things had changed--obviously referring to my being with the group again.  I didn't know how much the Brit had told him, though he would've had to be careful about what he let out; the last thing the Brit would want was for the old man to come sniffing around and find out about our vaccine.

On the flight from Quebec to New York I put him in the window seat and I took the aisle.  We had the luxury of an empty seat between us because the Brit'd bought three tickets, but Morten was in the snow back at the cabin. I'm guessing I wasn't the only one glad for the space.  But I'd glance over every once in a while and I could see the old man tightening up the closer we got to New York.  After all, he was flying back to the men who'd tried to kill him.  I knew all too well what that was like, and he sure as hell deserved to find out.  But I knew he wouldn't let them off easy.  

If he was dying to know how I'd managed to survive his last attempt to get rid of me, he kept it hidden after the initial shock of seeing me, locked behind that cool passivity of his.  But I guess asking would have been like admitting I'd won and he'd lost.

My mind was all over the place: the silo; the bait-and-switch he'd pulled on me when I joined the group.  The way he'd taken Scully--not just to make a statement, or to use her, but to mindfuck Mulder.  It made me wonder why the hell I hadn't just pulled the trigger back in the snow, when I had the chance, but it was too late for that now.  And much as I hated to think about it, I knew in my gut the Brit was right: the old man would have some key to surviving the future--some card up his sleeve--and I was going to find it and take it from him if it was the last thing I did.

The risk--because there's always a risk--was that he might find out about our vaccine.  We'd have to be incredibly careful from here on out.

Of course, the situation with the Praise kid fell right into Mulder and Scully's hands in spite of Jeffrey's attempts to block Mulder from his little investigation.  It was my first glimpse of Jeff, the one the old man was actually willing to own up to as his flesh and blood, and I only saw him from a distance.  But he seemed like a wuss to me, a kid way out of his depth who'd be calling out for some referee to make everything 'fair' when the pushing and shoving started.  Still, there he was, another pawn dropped into the FBI the same way I'd been once, a sitting duck with no clue what Daddy'd do when he didn't perform to expectations.

We did end up with the Praise kid, though things didn't go according to plan.  Scully'd ended her babysitting shift early, so the guys they sent in ended up shooting Diana instead, not knowing she wasn't the target.  When I heard about it, I flashed back to that evening in Scully's apartment, Cardenal with his itchy trigger finger firing before he'd even had a chance to see who was coming through the doorway.  Well, it  _had_  kept me from shooting Scully.  In the end I was glad I hadn't; at some point Mulder could probably come to understand his father's hit as a strategic thing, but if I'd killed Scully, it would've been nothing but personal to him.  He never would have listened to anything I had to say again.

The old man turned the kid over to us and went off to check on Diana, who was barely hanging on, and then on to whatever scheming he had planned--something, whatever it was, to broaden his influence over the group.  He was back in the saddle and I knew he wouldn't waste any time taking advantage of that. 

\---------------------------

SCENE: ROAD TRIP

_Krycek is tasked with delivering chess wunderkind Gibson Praise to a Consortium research facility, an assignment that proves messier than he expects._

 

Word had leaked to the media that a chess wunderkind in protective custody in the D.C. area had been kidnapped, and the men upstairs didn't want to take a chance on any of their Fort Marlene employees recognizing the kid; hell, they might start to question what they were actually working on. Still, it came as a shock when I was told I'd been elected to play chauffeur, hauling the kid to a consortium research facility in the New Mexico desert, out of reach of the snooping media.  

You've got to figure: you're dealing with a potential escapee, but you're handing him over to a guy with one arm.  Why?  Beyond that, the kid had a spooky, all-knowing sort of way about him.  I'd been there when the old man passed him off to the Brit; the kid had called the Brit a liar to his face.  It'd been funny at the time; I'd had to work to keep from laughing out loud.  But it wouldn't be nearly so amusing if the kid's mind were trained on me.  The old men had a penchant for exaggeration--not everything critical in the world revolved around them and their plans--but if this chess kid could read minds with anywhere near the accuracy they were claiming, my vaccine project could land right in the kid's spotlight. 

I wondered if this was my kiss of death from the Brit. I'd obviously been getting nowhere fast in my attempts to access the vaccine lately and he could be figuring it was time to cut me loose, that I had nothing more to offer him. Hell, he'd been anything but accommodating the past month or so. If he was still on my side, he would have been working his manicured fingers off to get this babysitting job assigned where it belonged: with some green hire eager to prove himself.  

Or maybe it was the old man who was behind giving this assignment.  

It would be like him: watch me squirm, see where the probing led, what he could learn from it to use against me. If the kid were for real, hauling him would be like setting a psychic tape recorder in the car with me.  Afterward he could have the kid regurgitate whatever he'd dug out of my head.

Trouble was, I was in no position to turn down an assignment that came from the board room.  And desperate as I was to get my hands on the Cali vaccine, I'd just given it my best try and we'd failed. Much as my instinct was to launch right back, shoulder first, into the brick wall that was FarmaCol, another part of me knew it wasn't going to get me anywhere. I needed to back off, take a breath. Without a clear head, I was going to miss my opportunity, whatever that might turn out to be.  I didn't want to wait, and this trek with the kid wasn't my idea of a way to clear my head, but as far as I could see, I didn't have much of a choice.  I was just going to have to tough it out and hope the few days off would give me the perspective I was looking for.   

The Brit did drop by before I went to pick up the kid. He put on a show of concern and supplied me with more than enough drugs to keep the kid out of it for the duration in the interest of not having my mind picked. The plan was to let the boy come around only long enough to eat, clean up and get himself between the rental car and a motel room under his own power, since there was no way I could carry a twelve-year-old with only one good arm. Then it would be back to dreamland. If I pushed myself, I should be able to make the trip in two days, with only one motel stop--a single point of potential exposure. At least, that's what I told myself.  Even so, I wasn't looking forward to this in the least. I'm not cut out to be anybody's damn nanny.

On the road with the kid laid across the back seat, safely out of it, my mind couldn't stop piecing together scenarios to get me to the vaccine.  Arizábal had done just what Marita asked him to--protect the vaccine--but given the turn in our circumstances, he'd taken things way too far.  I was willing enough to take him out if would do any good, but realistically, without him I was never going to access those 24,000 doses of potentially planet-saving vaccine that were gathering dust, not to mention the ones that could still be produced  Fear was a good motivator for a family man, though.  I could point my 9mm at his wife, parents, kids, whoever if I had to.  How far would I have to press him before he'd crack?  The idea of shooting kids had always hit me like a punch in the gut, but with the world at stake... Life sucks.  Maybe I could hand the dirty work over to Raul, though I had no idea whether he'd be willing or capable; we'd never discussed him doing that kind of shit.  Damn the stupid bitch who'd spent so long setting up a way to save the world and then dumped out on it.  No hope was better than false hope exposed for what it really was.

I'd barely crossed from Virginia into Tennessee when the air conditioning in the rental car went out. I kept checking the back seat, and it didn't take long for the kid's cheeks to start turning red. I had to stop every hour or so to re-soak a couple of towels to keep him cool, but there was no break from the heat for me. By the time we hit Memphis, I'd started to weave, and aside from that I stank from sweating into the seat for sixteen straight hours.  Past midnight and it was still 84 degrees and as humid as a sauna.  I got a motel room, stumbled inside and took a shower while I waited for the kid to come around in the car. When he did, I managed to coax him inside. He was still pretty groggy, which I figured gave me an advantage.  Stupid fucking assignment.  I sent him in to take a piss, and when he came out again, I gave him a carton of milk laced with the drugs, and he was gone again. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow...

... And woke up nine hours later from jumbled dreams, feeling like shit: achy all over, nausea, headache.  And an empty bed beside me. No sign of my cargo. Adrenaline surged through me and I managed to stumble into my clothes and head out looking for him, fear of what the old men would do to me if I'd lost him competing with the feeling of sickness and the pounding in my head.

Found the kid a few minutes later in the motel's breakfast room, glued to the TV. It looked like Diana'd been right about TV sucking up the kid's concentration.   I wanted to wring his neck, not smile, but I was posing as the dad and the desk clerk had an eye on me.  

"Hey," I said, trying for a casual delivery. "Missed you."

Gibson looked up; a startled look passed through his eyes, but he smoothed it over quickly enough. "I was hungry," he said, matter of fact.  Then he got off his chair and came with me back to the room.

I didn't get it. 

"Why didn't you take off while you had the chance?" I said when I'd locked the door behind us.

"I'm a kid."  He gave me an exasperated 'you  _should_  get it' look.  "I don't have any money."

I shook my head. "Nice try," I said. "You could've run to anyone, say you'd been kidnapped. Isn't that what they tell kids to do?"

Gibson crawled onto the bed, a struggle given those short legs of his, and settled himself. His face changed from that impassive Little Guru look to serious.

"Because I knew what you'd do to me if I tried it. How you'd come after me--"

"Shut up."

My head was pounding but I made myself move toward the mini-fridge and reached inside to grab a carton of milk.

"Dreamtime," I said, opening the carton and fishing in my pocket for one of the capsules.

One-handed it would be a bitch, and anyway, I was getting pretty shaky; all I wanted was to lie down before I collapsed. So I made the kid open it and pour the little beads into the milk.

"I don't care about whatever's inside your mind," he said in the same matter-of-fact voice he'd used to tell the Brit he was a liar. "I don't want to know. It's why I went to the breakfast room. So I wouldn't hear you."

"Yeah, well, don't fall over yourself doing me any favors. Drink."  

I nodded toward the carton and the kid drank it down. I sank onto the side of my bed, propped my head in my good hand and counted the thud-thud-thud of the pain pounding through my forehead. I was sweating like a pig. And in no shape to go anywhere; that was pretty clear. We'd be spending at least the better part of the day here... and that was a best-case scenario. I just hoped what I was feeling was the effect of all those miles in a heat wave with no air conditioning, and not the onset of something worse.   

When I looked up again, the kid was lying on his back, his hands folded over his belly, glassy-eyed.   

I reached down, pushed off my shoes and stood.  By rights I should be in Cali, talking to people, making connections, watching Arizábal's every move.  I glanced a few seconds at the body in the next bed before I pulled the blankets up to cover him. He was a strange little kid, Gibson, one leg shorter than the other so that he kind of ambled when he walked, like an old man. Then there was the matching attitude: a kind of resigned calmness, like he was two or three layers removed from face-to-face reality. If he actually had any idea what the old men were like--what they might have in store for him--then why the hell hadn't he done the smart thing and taken off?  

"You should've run," I said as I headed for the bathroom to scrounge up some ibuprofen. How smart could he really be? Hell if I would've stuck around if I were him.

Then I pretty much collapsed into bed and slept away the better part of the day.  No dreams that I could recall, either. I woke up late in the afternoon feeling better than before, and just in time to catch the local rental company office and get them to swap out the car for one with working AC. The kid was beginning to stir, and I knew I was going to have to get some food into him, so I told him I was going to head over to the restaurant across the parking lot to eat, and that he should use the time to take a shower.  It would give me some time to think at a safe distance, and anyway, I was hungry.  I let the kid know I'd be sitting where I could see the door to the room, so he'd better stay put. All I got from that was a mild eye roll. The only other possible exit from the room was a high window in the bathroom, above the shower, and I figured he didn't have the strength or the agility to get to it.  

All he asked was whether he could watch TV when he was done, and if he could have fried chicken and a milkshake.

Getting some food into my stomach helped.  I resolved to try to focus on the task at hand rather than stewing over what it was keeping me from.  No use giving myself an ulcer.  I wasn't ready for any driving marathon, but on the other hand, nighttime driving would be cooler, with less traffic. It was a little after 7 p.m. There was the problem of timing with the kid: if I put him under now, it would be another eight hours before he came around again, which meant eight more hours stuck where I was. On the other hand, if we started soon, two hours should get us to Little Rock, another two-plus to Ft. Smith near the Oklahoma border. I could stop for a few hours' rest in either of those places if I needed to. However far I got, I'd be that much closer to my destination, and to seeing this assignment finished.  Then I could get back to figuring out how to get my hands on the Cali vaccine.

After the kid had eaten, I took him out to the car. He knew what was coming.  

"I don't like milk that much," he said. "Could you mix it in juice or soda or something this time?"

"Milk's good for you."

He shrugged. "What do you care? You're just turning me over to  _them_." No anger, just more of that detached delivery that was really starting to get under my skin.

"They told me to mix it with milk. Maybe it reacts badly with something else." Not that I owed him any explanations. "Anyway, it's already in the milk." I handed him the carton. "Go on. Drink."

He sighed, but he drank it. When he'd finished, he looked up. "You know they're going to be looking for me--my parents and the police. You can't just hide me forever."

I snorted, but not because it was funny. The kid had no idea--absolutely no idea. "Lie down," I said, and shut the car door. So that was his plan: he was just going to wait it out, expecting the cavalry to come and save him.  

He sure as hell didn't know these men. You didn't get away from them.   

I'd been a kid once, too. Nobody had ever come for me. 

I waited a half a minute or so and glanced back through the window.  The kid was getting glassy-eyed but he turned and looked at me, an expression of confusion or worry or... I don't know.  I couldn't tell, except that it wasn't a look I'd seen on him before.  

Whatever it was, it was enough to make me turn away.  I locked the doors, went back to get our bags and checked the room one last time. Then I returned to the car, checked to see that the kid was out and drove west into the fading evening light.

The kid's expression from a few minutes earlier stuck in my head like a lingering dark spot from glancing at the sun.  Had he seen something inside me?  I wanted to err on the side of caution in my assumptions about the kid, but I couldn't see him pulling anything coherent from it.  Given the drugs he'd just ingested, any view he'd gotten was likely to be murky and distorted, like something seen through a fun house mirror.  I knew; I'd been in that position myself.

Beyond that, when you came right down to it, in spite of the old men's panic about his potential, he was just a kid.  The boy might be a mind reader, but that didn't necessarily make him this huge threat.  When I thought about it, the old men had reacted like a bunch of elephants who'd spotted a mouse. Would a twelve-year-old--especially one with any smarts--actually try to tell someone that he knew about a shadowy conspiracy of international power brokers? Would he expect anybody to believe him? At the age of eleven--a year younger than my cargo--the old man had decided it was time for me to get acquainted with the entity that would be taking over our planet by watching one of the black oil 'experiments' they were doing at a prison camp. Did I try to tell anybody what I'd seen?

Okay, beside the fact that the old man had warned me with a look that sent shivers through me that I was never to tell anyone what I'd seen--ever--I knew what would have happened if I'd said anything at the orphanage. It would have gotten around and the minders would have taken me for a nut job and picked me apart, teasing.  And the kids, well... kids who grow up in institutions are like sharks; they pick up on the scent of blood almost instantly. Let's see: psychiatric drugs, institutionalization, or just good old-fashioned peer torment. No thanks. Instead, I made sure to keep what I knew--and the terror that would creep up on me in my dreams--to myself.  

When I thought about it, though, I realized there'd always been a kind of disconnect in my head between my everyday world and what I'd seen at the camp. It was almost like the Oil was a puzzle piece that didn't fit, a rogue image my mind had made up.  Sometimes I wasn't sure whether it was real or just the residue of a particularly vivid nightmare. Maybe this kid Gibson was stuck in the same kind of rut--not able to wrap his mind around the fact that what was happening to him was all too real.  

After two hours I hit Little Rock. The sun was finally going down and it was obvious that the sickness I'd fought earlier in the day was taking its toll on my stamina.  I pulled off at a park along the way, splashed some water on my face, drank a soda for the caffeine and walked around for a few minutes to clear my head, but I didn't spend long because it was just as hot as the night before and I couldn't afford to leave the kid in a closed-up car to bake. Which was also the reason I wasn't going to be able to pull off anywhere along the side of the road and just sack out for a while: without the air conditioning, it would just be too damn hot. So I got back into the car and drove on.  

About an hour out of Little Rock there was a sign for a state park beside a lake and I decided to take a chance on it. Found a spot right next to the water, in their empty visitor center parking lot, where there was enough of a breeze off the lake to make things tolerable, and sacked out in the front seat. I woke up once, around midnight, cooled the kid down with wet towels and drifted off again, only to find myself snagged in a dream about the Alberta outpost, sitting at the dinner table with Jeremiah Smith's creepy clone kids on those long wooden benches, the way I had four years earlier--empty-eyed kids, cogs in the wheel of a 'greater purpose'.

Maybe it was the dream that sparked the connection to the kid in the back seat.  Or maybe not.  But about 3 a.m., when Gibson's drugs started to wear off, the realization started to filter through as my head began to clear.  I didn't know why I hadn't seen it before: the old men weren't having me haul the kid off just because they were afraid of him.  They were planning on using him.  A science experiment, a weapon--whatever--but the kid was destined for some sort of personal hell, and I was the one who was going to be delivering him to its front door.  

I felt my good hand curl into a fist.  If it weren't for the risk of injuring the only usable hand I had, I would have punched the wall.

Gibson was starting to come around in the back seat, moaning a little and starting to shift around, restless. Obviously he was overheated again.  I forced away my grogginess and sat up.  On the one hand, I knew I'd better not be delivering a sick kid to the jaws of the dragon.  On the other... 

On the other, I needed a chance to clear my head.  Alone.

I scanned the shadows around us, looking for an option that would keep my mind safe from mental prying.  What kind of distance would be involved in getting beyond the range of the kid's radar?  
Maybe keeping him occupied was more important than the actual distance involved.  

I cleared my throat.  "You know, you could cool off in the water for a while." I pointed out the passenger window. "The kiddy beach is right there. You can see it roped off--look. Water in the shallows has had the whole day to warm up. Bet it's nice."

Gibson sat up and peered out into the darkness. "But it's the middle of the night."  

Honestly this was the first time I'd heard any real degree of expression in his voice, even if it was obvious he thought I was nuts.

"So? What difference does it make?" I gestured toward the water's edge. "You're hot. There's enough moonlight to see where you're going." I paused. "It pays to be flexible, look at whatever options come your way."

"But I don't have any swim trunks."  I could almost feel the kid frown.  

"Use your underwear. Who's going to see you? You've got underwear, right?"

After a pause, I heard a little sigh and he nodded.  

"Go on," I said, nodding toward the towels on the seat beside him. "Cool off while you can. I'll keep an eye on you."

Okay, so I hadn't anticipated the way that last part would come out, but Gibson seemed not to catch it. He picked a towel from the heap on the seat, pulled his shirt over his head and worked his pants and shoes off. Then he opened the car door and stepped out onto the pavement.

"Home's like this," he said, looking around. "It stays hot."

Like a sauna. I shook my head. I'd take winter in the Urals any day over this humidity you couldn't get away from. "Better wrap that towel around you--make yourself less of a target for mosquitoes."

Gibson looked up at me, just a split-second thing.  He seemed... I don't know, maybe curious.  Then he pulled the towel snug around his shoulders and started toward the water. I glanced around for park patrols: no moving lights, nothing.  

I let my head drop back against the headrest, then pulled up and slammed the side of my fist against the steering wheel.  Damn the old vultures.  

The old man, given some time, would probably think about the similarities--what I'd lived through as a kid, then hauling this boy off to be a slave to somebody else's purpose.  I could picture that sick smirk of his.  Or maybe he'd already thought of it; maybe it had given him a reason to push for giving me this job.  

If he had, I wasn't going to let him win.  I knew how to hold my focus.  There was a job to finish, and an even bigger job to get back to. Anyway, it was the way the world worked: people got caught up in the nets of creeps and schemers--or just plain bad luck--all the time.  Kids included.  If he had the smarts, the kid would get himself out of the old men's trap one way or another. 

I squinted at the clock on the dashboard and then turned my attention to Gibson, who was standing in the shallows, bent over, hands flat on the surface, testing the temperature of the water.  After a few seconds he waded in to his calves. A couple of tentative kicks to spray water, a few more steps out--quicker now--until the water was up to his knees. Then he was squatting down, lying on his belly in the shallows. Within another thirty seconds he was the silhouette of any kid, anywhere, splashing and playing, soaking up the freedom of the water.  

For a minute, not thinking, I smiled.  I remembered times like that... here and there. Moments when the clamps of life would loosen without warning and suddenly it was like the universe had turned inside out; for a few minutes you were in a different world, feeling almost weightless, no burdens on your back.

I got out of the car and started to walk the edge of the parking lot to stretch my legs.  We should take off soon and there'd be more than enough sitting over the next few hours.  Every few yards I'd glance back at the shadows where Gibson was.  The kid would have to toughen himself up--start to be more aware and pro-active. Look out for his own best interest.  Memories of the orphanage started to filter in, but I pushed them away, quickened my pace and focused on the rhythm of my feet.  

Eventually, Gibson came back to the car.

"I'm done now," he announced, reaching in for a drier towel.  The ordinary kid letting loose in the water was gone and he was his serious self again.  He rubbed his hair and stopped short.

"What?" I asked.

"I don't have any dry underwear. What am I going to--"

"Just leave 'em on. They'll dry along the way."

"Are we going to leave now?"

"Yeah."

"I'm kind of hungry..."

But knowing the kid, he wasn't going to ask me to get him anything.

"There's a little town a couple of miles back, on the way to the highway," I said. "We can pick you up something there."

Gibson climbed in and buckled his seat belt. "Thanks," he said as we pulled out of the parking lot.  

I didn't know what the thanks was for--the fact that he'd be getting food or that I'd let him swim. But I didn't ask. Hell, I was hardly his savior.

At a 24-hour place I picked the kid up some eggs and hash browns to eat in the car, and that milkshake he'd been hoping for. The drugs went into it; he managed to make his way through about half of it before he conked out. Then it was onto the highway again in the dark. It had gotten down to about 70 degrees, so for the first few hours I drove with the windows down, letting the air blow through the car to keep me alert and dry the kid's underwear. Once the sun came up, though, I had to close up and switch on the AC again. I had five hours left of my eight-hour window, and I wanted to make the most of it.

Which I did. By the time Gibson came around, a little after noon, I'd reached Amarillo in the Texas panhandle. I was bushed, so I got a motel, took him inside and put him under again before he was awake enough to realize what was happening. Something in the back of my head was telling me these back-to-back doses might have their downsides, but I needed the rest.  That, and I was getting tired of having to face the kid with another cup of dissolved drugs.  

Once Gibson was out, I hit the sack. The constant driving must have been starting to add up, because I overslept the kid's eight-hour mark by a couple of extra hours. When I came around and managed to focus on the clock, I pulled up, gasping. But the room was dark; the breathing in the next bed was light and even. Gibson was still asleep.

Ten at night. My head was thick and I wanted like anything to roll over and drift off again, but the question kept nagging at me: Why wasn't Gibson awake? Were the effects of the drugs starting to compound, or were they starting to affect him in some way we hadn't counted on? I'd lost the better part of a day's travel time in Memphis, so the kid'd had more doses than either the Brit or I could have anticipated. And he'd need one more to get us to the facility outside Socorro.

I crawled out of bed, turned on the light in the bathroom and went back into the shadows to look at the boy. He was out, alright--not faking it. The pulse in his neck was strong and regular, and he didn't seem overheated. Still, something felt off and it left me restless.  I headed for the shower, hoping to find some sort of clarity in the spray of hot water.  The only kind that came was that I was hauling a soft-skinned, wobbly-legged twelve-year-old with absolutely no agenda--a kid who only wanted to go home and get back to his sheltered life--to a place where he was going to be a bunch of researchers' new lab monkey.

Which was the last thing I needed to be thinking about.  

I finished up in the shower, toweled off and dressed. Might as well get started. It was 10:45 and I was only five road-hours from my destination.  After that, I could clear this whole trip out of my head and get my focus back to where it should be--on how to access the vaccine.

Enough things were running through my mind that I was caught completely off-guard, opening the bathroom door, to find Gibson standing in front of the dresser, staring at my prosthesis. His eyes got big and a finger pulled back quickly when he saw me.

"You need to use the bathroom, you better do it," I said, clearing my throat, and I waited until the door had shut behind him to dig into my bag for a clean socket liner.  The last thing I needed was anybody gawking at my arm--the fake one or what I had left of the original.  Then again, the kid had seemed really spooked.  I don't know whether he'd been more freaked out by the arm itself or the fact that I'd caught him staring at it.

By the time he came out, I had the car packed and ready to go. Gibson was hungry again, and I picked him up some yogurt and orange juice at a gas station convenience store when I filled the car. When I opened the door to hand him the food, he was frowning.

"What?"

"My stomach hurts."

"You should eat something. It's been a good eighteen hours since the lake. Maybe that's part of the problem--you just need something in your stomach."

He didn't look convinced. I unhooked the gas nozzle from the car, tightened down the gas cap and drove around to the side of the station to wait for Gibson to eat. A sigh came from the back seat and I turned around. The kid was staring at the yogurt container and the bottle of juice, wondering which one held the drugs.

"Start with the juice," I said.

He peeled the little strip off the cap and paused. "Can I ask you something?"

I shrugged. "What?"

"Do people ever make fun of you because of your arm? Kids make fun of me because I'm lopsided and I walk funny." He frowned. "Sometimes they call me Grandpa."

"They stare sometimes." I rubbed my thumb hard against the steering wheel. "But you have to not let it get to you. You know who you are, what you can do." I glanced behind me. "Sometimes that can be an advantage--when they underestimate you."   

"I guess," he said, but he didn't look convinced.  

"Eat," I said. "We need to get moving."

Gibson gave a sigh and took a drink of the orange juice. I started the car and pulled out onto the road. I'd stop five miles or so down the 1-40, when Gibson had eaten enough of the yogurt to knock himself out, and I'd lay him out on the seat.

I traveled the rest of the way in the dark, though I figure I didn't miss much in the way of scenery given the scrub desert that stretches between Amarillo and Albuquerque. Past midnight, the air turned fresh and I drove with the windows down. I tried to focus on what was ahead--what my next move would be in trying to break into the Fort Knox that was FarmaCol, and how I was going to keep my movements hidden from the old man, because there was no question he'd be watching me.  Still, memories of life in the orphanage lurked in the shadowed corners of my mind like cobwebs, hard to see until I'd walked right into them... and even harder to brush away.

On the last leg of the trip, south of Albuquerque, the sky began to lighten, the landscape taking shape around me in dark silhouettes, then in weak blues and yellows that gradually grew brighter and more intense, a gorgeous show that made the surrounding mountains stand out like rows of dark teeth.

Just after five I reached the facility, with sunrise not far off. I pulled into the parking lot, switched off the motor, turned back to check on Gibson--still dead to the world--and got out to stretch.  I sure as hell wasn't going to miss this constant driving.  Then I opened the kid's door and stood there just looking at him. Finally I went around to the trunk, got his things and took them over to the office and rang the bell.  There was a dull buzzing in my stomach.  I hadn't noticed it before; I'd been too focused on driving to think about being hungry.  I'd have to stop somewhere on the way back to Albuquerque--that is, if I came across anyplace open at this hour--and get myself something to eat. 

Eventually a thin, graying short-haired woman in scrubs showed up and unlocked the door.  I told her what I was there for.  

"Is the subject ambulatory? Do you need help?" she asked with about as much interest as if she were asking about about a delivery of towels. She picked up a clipboard with Gibson's name on it and started to look it over.  

When I didn't answer, she looked up.

"Yeah, I guess," I said. "He's... asleep."  

The woman called for someone to bring a wheelchair, and I headed for the car. The back seat smelled of sweaty kid. I gathered up Gibson's shoes and socks, stuffed the food containers into the paper bag they'd come in, and took a last glance at the kid: those geeky round glasses, one smooth cheek red from being pressed against the seat back, an arm hugging his stomach.   

Across the parking lot, a door slammed shut and the clattering wheels of a gurney came closer. Involuntarily, I swallowed.

When the guys with the gurney reached the car, I went around to the trunk and arranged the stuff inside it.  Sentimentality was a trap.  I'd been smart enough to know that at nine years old, so I wasn't sure why I was having to remind myself now.

The trip north was quiet.  I passed an all-night diner on the way out of Socorro, but the thought of sitting around didn't suit me and I told myself I could always find food in Albuquerque while I was waiting for my flight out.  I tried listening to the radio but the reception was bad, and anyway, there's only so much ranchero music you can take.  So I shut it off and listened to the wind roaring past the window.

At the edge of Albuquerque, I missed my turn-off and had to take the next one.  It turned out--just my luck--to be Gibson Boulevard.  I told myself it was just a crazy coincidence and kept going. Within four hours, I was airborne and on my way back to New York, mission complete.

But later, looking back, I could see how the whole trip with the kid had been like the start of the kind of hairline crack that wedges itself open wider over time.  Which, given everything else that was about to happen, was the last thing I needed.

\-----------------------------

NARRATIVE B

_Back from delivering Gibson Praise to New Mexico, life isn't cutting Krycek any slack._

 

Heading back from Albuquerque to New York only reminded me of what my life held for me at that point: the shifty Brit; the stuffed shirts of the group; the old man, who undoubtedly was fine-tuning his plans for taking over the whole operation.  The bitch who'd sold me out: there was no telling which way she'd turn now that she seemed to be recovering.  That is, if her mind was still in there--if the Oil hadn't permanently altered it in some way.  And to top things off, my so-far failed attempts to access the Cali vaccine.

Consciously, I knew there was going to be no way around dealing with all this shit, but it didn't stop something in the back of my mind, when I'd finally crawl into bed at night, from wishing there were a way off this goddamn treadmill.

I let myself fantasize about going back to the Canadian Gulf Islands, where I'd spent time once before, but when I checked it out I found that in July every cottage, cabin and motel room was full; every island was crawling with vacationers. The only place that had any rooms available was in a little island farther north than the rest. It was colder, isolated, which would've been fine by me.  But the only town there, Sointula, had been home to a failed socialist utopian experiment of a bunch of Finns in the early 1900s, and thanks but I didn't need anything that might even vaguely remind me of the kind of place I'd grown up. Anyway, what excuse could I come up with to leave New York that wouldn't raise eyebrows, or sent me off with surveillance in tow?

I'd barely been back a week when I got a message from Miguel Ansbach to bring the Brit and meet him at the import/export building.  He looked pale, shaken, and he didn't waste time or pad the bad news: Arizábal, our FarmaCol contact, was dead, killed in a mistaken drug cartel hit.  Due to the secrecy required for our vaccine, he'd coordinated all the details of the production himself; he was the only one who even knew what the stuff was. 

So we were dead in the water.  Hell, if Marita suddenly came to her senses and coughed up the access code now, it wouldn't gain us a damn thing.  Production of the vaccine was history, and along with it, the strategic edge that tens of thousands--maybe even hundreds of thousands--of protected humans would have given us in the coming fight. 

It was like getting hit in the face with a brick. 

Ansbach gave a helpless shrug; the Brit and I were numb.  There just wasn't anything more to say. The Brit had a company limo take us back to headquarters on 46th, but I couldn't bring myself to go inside just to sit around making small talk, pretending the bottom hadn't just fallen out of our only real hope for survival. I told the Brit I needed some air. I guess he was still too caught off-guard to give me that squinty frown of his and order me to go upstairs with him like a good lackey.

I said I'd be in touch, then took off walking, mind in a daze, not sure where I was headed until I found myself in front of a Russian cafe on 54th where a guy I'd grown up with worked. I hadn't replied when he'd sent me a message two months earlier, but I went in now and found him in the back, washing dishes. "Come on," I said to the surprised Dima as I pressed a hundred dollar bill into his boss's hand. "You've got the night off."

He'd been in this country over a year and still hadn't been able to find anything better than dishwashing, so his mood matched mine just fine. We went back to his place, exchanged sob stories--okay, edited, in my case--and spent the rest of the evening drinking ourselves into a stupor.

In the morning I woke up to a pounding headache and the knowledge that just wouldn't go away that the vaccine program was dead and the plans I'd mapped out in my head for gathering the immune population to fight the aliens were never going to amount to anything more than flimsy fantasies. Four months ago I'd been inches from the top of the heap: I had a working vaccine, a partner I thought I could trust, a chance to twist the chains on the fuckers in the board room. And the sweet belief that the old man was nothing more than a puddle of bone and decomposing goo on the floor of a clammy casket. Every one of those things had been turned around now, or exposed as the lies they'd always been.

It was when I found myself leaning over a sleeping Dima, my weapon three inches from the side of his head, flicking off the safety and telling myself what a huge favor I'd be doing him by sending him off this rat race planet before the real terror hit, that I knew I had to get out of there. I had to clear my head somehow, get a grip, even though I couldn't see anything to hold onto. 

I managed to click the safety back on, holstered my weapon and made it to the refrigerator, where I dug around looking for something--anything--that would help neutralize the hangover.  Ended up draining all the juice out of Dima's pickle jar, then grabbed my jacket and took off.  Kept my eyes closed against the brightness during most of the taxi ride to my hotel, all the while the logic side of my brain ('You've been here before'/'You've always found a way to go forward') duked it out with the cynic that smirked and slapped down every argument my mind put to it.  In the end all that was resolved was that I needed to get some sleep--preferably a whole lot of sleep--and then decide how bad things looked when I came around again.

But when I'd managed to work the key in the lock, desperate to collapse onto the bed and escape the train wreck inside me, I caught the smoky scent of something all too familiar.

"We haven't spoken since our flight from Quebec," the old  man said, not bothering with any formalities.  He was sitting in an easy chair near the floor-length window.  The ashtray on the table beside him, I noticed, was half-full of Morley butts. 

I did my best to suck it up, though I figure I didn't pull it off very well.  "So?"

"I've been thinking," he said, taking a drag on his cigarette.  "I've missed out on a lot of your life the last couple of years, Alex."

"If you'd had your way, I would've been dead all this time."

He shrugged off my words.  "Things change."

"Maybe not as much as you think." 

My head was still pounding.  This was the last thing I needed.  "Look, I think I'm coming down with something.  I need some rest."  I pointed to the ashtray.  "Those aren't helping.  Take the ashtray with you on your way out."

In the back of my mind I knew the lack of diplomacy probably wasn't scoring me any points; I flashed back to the car bomb following a confrontation where I'd told him it was no fault of mine that his idiot lackey Cardenal had shot Scully's sister.  Still, the din in my head took me beyond caring.  I turned down the bed and went into the bathroom to take a leak.  When I came out again, he was gone.  By rights the fact that he'd shown up should have kept me awake, wondering what he wanted and what the hell extra danger I might be in now, but I conked out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.  When I finally woke up, the sun was setting and there was a light flashing on the phone, a message from the old man.  Meet him the following day in front of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park at 2 p.m., it said.

A knot formed in my gut, but it also made me realize I was hungry.  I looked through the mini-fridge, took out some orange juice and drank it while I watched the sun melt down behind the high-rises and let my head clear.  Then I ordered some food from room service and went to take a shower while I waited.

When I came out, towel wrapped around me, I discovered my food on the coffee table and the Brit sitting on the couch.

I tightened.  "Must be a sign on the door that says 'open house'."  I headed to the closet to find some clothes.

"Then Spender has come to see you?" the Brit's voice followed me.

"Just what I needed after yesterday."

There was a long pause.  "I'm afraid he's been taking a rather careful look at what's been going on."

I stopped, T-shirt half on.  That knot in my stomach again.  After a beat I made myself push forward.  I put my good arm in the sleeve and paused in front of the two prostheses on the shelf.  The hook: it was quicker to put on, more useful.  Besides, it always seemed to make the Brit a little nervous.

"He's been asking questions," the Brit said, looking up as I entered the room.  "About how you came to be with us, about how you'd come to know about and have access to the Russian vaccine.  About whether Ms. Covarrubias was being forced to deliver your message about the boy or if there was some other arrangement involved."  He frowns.  "And about how you came to be under my direction."

"And you told him what?"  Hell, this was  _not_  the way to start the day...  er, night.  Whatever.  I eased myself down into the chair opposite him.

The Brit shrugged.  "As little as possible, though I fear he's going to learn more than is good for us."  He paused.  "Have you examined this room for bugs?"

I hadn't before, but I got to it now.  I checked all the usual places and found nothing, though I did notice that the old man had actually taken out his ashtray when he left earlier.  Which was more than I'd been expecting.

"He's always known about the Russian vaccine research," I said, settling myself in the chair again.  "He got me a job as a lab assistant in the early stages, back in '85.  Then at some point he just took off, stopped checking up on them."

The Brit's eyebrows went up.  "Possibly when our own research began to look promising."

"That's what I figure," I said, though I wasn't convinced it made sense; it would take a sure thing, not just hope, to make the old man abandon the promise of the Russian research.  I sucked in a breath and let it out again.  "So what did you tell him about Covarrubias?"

"As far as anyone at headquarters knows, she was operating out of loyalty, stealing the boy for us.  I covered for her right from the beginning, knowing that to do otherwise would endanger your vaccine operation.  I told Spender nothing more than that."  He shrugged.  "As for you, I said you wanted revenge, that you wanted to destroy our work because of what he'd done to you and because you'd been left on the outside.  He understands that--revenge.  And that the boy's information had provided you, quite propitiously, with the appropriate leverage."

"What about you and me?"

"I said I'd taken you on as a challenge, hoping to draw out of you more information that might prove beneficial to us.  And in the hopes that your skills or background might somehow prove useful to us."

"He's not going to buy that.  Not completely.  He knows you've been on the fringes of the group for years, that you'd do things differently if it were your call."  I ran a hand back through wet hair.  "He ever ask you if you know how I got out of that silo?"

"No."  His brow creases.  "I'm not sure whether it hasn't occurred to him or whether he's holding onto the question, waiting for the appropriate moment to spring it."  He let out a sigh.  "I'm afraid he isn't going to stop at anything we tell him.  He may find out more, perhaps that Dr. Ansbach is involved."  He frowned.  "You'd be best advised not to visit Dr. Ansbach after this.  At least not without taking very careful precautions."

I shrugged.  "I've got no reason to go see him.  Not after yesterday."

"Yes, well..."  He stood and walked to the window.  By now it was dark, the city's lights winking in the blue-black on the other side of the glass.  "I think it might be best if you were to have a reason to be out of town for a while, until I can help to put some of his curiosity to rest."

"What, you don't trust me?  Think I'll spill something, or snap and shoot the fucker?"  I forced out a laugh but choked on it.  My voice dropped.  "Okay, I'd give a hell of a lot to get away from this swamp for a while.  Permanently would be nice."

"Though I daresay your leaving abruptly would rouse his suspicions.  Let me find you an assignment, something very legitimate."

"I'm supposed to meet him tomorrow at two in front of the Delacorte in Central Park."

"Then you'll have to go through with it.  Perhaps it will give us an indication of which way he's inclined strategically.  It could prove useful"--he turned to face me--"if you're careful with your replies."

"Giving him a third chance at me isn't something I'm just going to hand him.  I'll be careful."

But the fact was, the prospect left me jittery as hell.  I sat up for hours after the Brit left, trying to put myself in the old man's shoes, attempting to figure out anything he might ask me and how I could answer in order to protect myself and what I knew.  Because when I thought about it, there wasn't any part of what I'd done since he'd had that car rigged to explode that wouldn't make him want to tear me apart, slowly bleed me for every piece of information I'd gathered and then snuff me out once and for all.

\--------------------------------

NARRATIVE C

 _An unexpected incident in Texas results in upheaval, including the death of the Well-Manicured Man.  When the Elders start to notice Krycek's strategic abilities, CSM moves in to take Krycek's reins_.

 

 

The old man ended up canceling out on our meeting in Central Park.  He was called away to somewhere, though nobody bothered to let me know where.  There was this surge of relief, as if I'd escaped a date with a firing squad, but the feeling didn't last long.  And then things got crazy.

A couple of weeks later some seriously unlucky Texas kid fell into a hole that just happened to contain a pocket of millennia-old black Oil, and all hell broke loose.  Another six days and the Brit was confetti, blown to bits in his limo after passing a vial of vaccine to Mulder so he could save Scully, who'd been picked up by the group and hauled off to Antarctica.  Naturally, Mulder followed her like a bloodhound.

In the end he managed to get her back, but not without setting off alarm bells that had the potential to bring Armageddon down on our heads early.  The vaccine Mulder injected into Scully spread through the Antarctica ship's holding system almost instantly... at least, according to Mulder's communications with Skinner, which the group intercepted.  The old men sat up half the night wringing their hands over how they were going to spin the evidence of a vaccine to the Colonists.  Finally, sometime after midnight, word came in that a military satellite had witnessed the explosion of a large circular craft 150 miles above the surface.  The report's details meshed with the window of time when the ship had taken off.  You could see the wrinkled foreheads around the room smooth out, the shoulders go slack.

But we still needed a cover story for the Colonists, who were going to want to know why their ship had suddenly taken off.  Mechanical failure wasn't going to cut it as an excuse; the ship had been there for years, running on a low degree of standby power; it hadn't had a single problem in the past.  Leave it to Mulder to be the catalyst for an interplanetary incident.

But solid ideas for building plausible deniability weren't coming.  Even the old man was keeping his mouth shut, probably because hauling Scully to Antarctica had been his bright idea.  Long about 3 a.m., though, I was getting damn tired of the ringing silence, the occasional grunt and the cigar smoke.  All I wanted was to go home, get some shuteye and hopefully get rid of the headache that had settled in behind my eyes.  Why I was even there?  I guess they'd gotten used to seeing me; it had become routine, the Brit hauling me along to meetings to prove he had me on the required leash.  Though the Brit was gone now--a fact the old men carefully avoided discussing--and still they'd called me in.  Who knows what they had in mind, or whether it was just force of habit. 

Finally I found myself clearing my throat.  "Tell them it was sabotage--their Rebel enemies."   I'm not sure I'd actually expected to say it out loud; it wasn't really my place to take part in their discussions.  The sound of my voice quickly put me on alert, and I watched bodies around the room straighten.  "Look, what's going to do you the most good?  Send their focus somewhere else, toward the shadows lurking in the woodwork.  Say someone on the craft saw one of those faceless men before it happened.  Then let 'em stew in their own assumptions.  It's going to take the spotlight off us, right?  And it can't hurt to have them jumpy, wondering if the Rebels are watching them, ready to attack."

There were the usual grunts and frowns at first, but I read something on the old men's faces I'd never seen there before: a kind of stirring, like suddenly they'd noticed me for the first time, seen me as something other than trouble. 

"What about Mulder?" came a voice from the shadows.  "If not for him, this crisis would never have occurred."

"An automobile accident should take care of the problem," the chairman replied in that dry voice of his.  He'd always reminded me of someone's butler. 

"A severed brake line," someone else said.

"No," I cut in.  "Any evidence of foul play and Scully won't drop it until she finds out who was responsible."

"Take care of her, too, then," shrugged another.

"I'll take care of Mulder."  The old man stood, flicked his lighter to the end of a Morley and sent out a cloud of smoke.  "Remember that there are those who look up to him, who would take on his mantle, as it were, if it appeared he'd been martyred.  There's no need to forcibly remove Mulder from the picture if he can be made to do it himself."

"What do you mean?"

"Take the shell off a snail and what happens?  It shrivels up of its own accord."  The old man put the cigarette back to his lips.  "Take away Mulder's access--his purpose--and he'll soon lose the will to keep fighting his little crusade."  He paused.  "Look at how unstable... unhinged... he became when his father was killed."   

The old man glanced at me with a sharpness I wasn't expecting. 

"Mulder will take himself out of the game," he went on, looking past the men in the room and out the darkened window.  And that amused smile of his pulled at the corner of his mouth.  He was going to enjoy every minute of taking Mulder down.  It would be some kind of slow torture.

The meeting broke up and I grabbed a taxi back to my hotel.  Standing bleary-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth, it suddenly hit me:  I'd said 'us'.  Telling the Colonists that the Rebels were behind their ship's take-off and crash would take the focus off  _us_.  As if I were one of them.  Maybe that's what the darts coming from the old man's eyes had been about.  Then again, it wasn't far from his typical reaction to anything that had to do with me... unless he was trying to butter me up because he wanted something.  Hopefully he'd missed what I said.  It'd been late, everyone in the room exhausted.  Maybe I was just being paranoid.

Whatever.  It was too late to think.  About anything.  The immediate danger of an alien strike had passed, the surfaced Oil and the problems it caused had been taken care of, and all I wanted was to hit the sack and get away from the steady backbeat of pain in my head.  I shook a pill out of the container on the shelf, swallowed it, chased it with a glass of water and hit the sack.  Hopefully in the morning, things would be looking a little better; they'd make more sense and the patterns would be clearer. 

But when the morning sun on my face woke me, my mind was already going.  Hauling Scully off to Antarctica had been based on underestimating Mulder's ability and willingness to leap tall buildings when he was motivated enough.  The danger of underestimating Mulder: I'd have to file that away.  It could come in handy someday.

*~*~*~*~*

Turned out I was right on two counts.  The old men took my advice, and the Colonists swallowed the line they fed them about the Rebels being the cause of their craft's explosion.  And it did seem that I'd made an impression on the old men: They sent me to organize a small aircraft hangar they kept at Martin State, a little airport outside Baltimore, and it didn't take me long to figure out that I wasn't just on clean-up detail.  Later, with the old men's confidence in me a little higher, I'd find out it was a drop point for something important: beryllium, a difficult-to-process metal with critical military applications that they were picking up under the table from a production plant somewhere in the heartland and then selling to the highest bidder to help finance their hybrid research.  I managed to contact Tolya in Moscow.  He was aware of some of the feelers the group had put out, as well as the kinds of potential customers who were looking for what the old men were dealing: small rogue states looking to overpower their neighbors, underground scientists, terrorists.

It showed me again, in case I'd had any doubts, just what kind of scum the old men were, though I knew that if it had been a case of me trying to finance the secret vaccine with no other way to do it, I might have done the same thing.  The difference was that I wasn't trying to fuck over the planet's entire population just to save my own butt. 

Whatever. 

The old man probably would have objected to the way I was being given an entre into the group, but as soon as word came in that the Colonists had bought our explanation about the Antarctica ship, he took off for New Mexico to oversee the research being done on Gibson Praise.  Most likely he figured Gibson was his golden boy, that the kid might hold some new secret to survival, and he wanted to scoop the rest of the group and use the knowledge himself, if it were true. 

Frankly, having him off my back was a huge relief; he wasn't there to question how I'd managed to access the Russian vaccine, or to think about whether Marita's infection had come as a result of something other than her loyalty to the group.  I knew eventually he'd be pressing me for answers to those questions, and I'd have to be ready with answers I could get him to swallow.  Anything to keep him away from the truth.

In the meantime, the way my luck had turned with the old men gave me something better to focus on.  I hadn't figured on ever getting an invitation back to the inside.  For as much as I hated the old men and what they were doing, the reality was that by going it alone at this point, I'd have no contacts, no leverage, nothing to work with.  The only thing that made sense was to get as far inside as they'd let me until a better option came along.  I'd gather up all the intel that came my way and save it for whatever use it might have later on.

Another six weeks and things weren't looking nearly so rosy.  Some of the captured Oil managed to infect a Roush worker in Arizona, and it wasn't until it had gestated and the screamer took off, leaving two dead humans and a lot of blood behind, that the group was alerted.  The news media were onto it, so there was a rush to find the thing and destroy it.  The old man took his little captive bloodhound Gibson to sniff the screamer out, but the kid managed to escape and ended up with Mulder and Scully.  The group got him back, but only briefly; somehow Gibson managed to give them the slip at the power plant after the screamer holed up there was found and neutralized.

The old man stayed in the area a good week, spearheading the search for the kid, but it seemed Gibson had vanished into thin air.  Diana'd managed to get him out of the facility and secure him with electrical tape she found in the panel van that had brought him there, but when she came back, the kid was gone.  There were no torn bits of tape, nothing he could have cut it with, no sign of a struggle.  They brought in sniffing dogs, but the scent trail evaporated outside the van.  If one of the alien groups had swooped in and sucked him up, there'd likely be some sort of reaction shaking out, but we never heard anything.

The old man had people beat the bushes for miles around.  They even scanned the area surrounding the power plant with infrared in case the kid was hiding out in the desert somewhere, but they didn't find a thing.  Finally they turned the search over to a couple of bounty hunters, and the old man returned to New York.  For me, the timing couldn't have been worse.  He could see right away the way things were going, how the group was starting to regard me, and it was too much for him.  He managed one of those pseudo-earnest smiles of his.  He wanted to train me, he told the rest of them.  Guide me.  Teach me.  Make me more valuable to the organization.  There were nods all around, as if not a damn one of them saw what he was doing.

So Diana and Jeff, the old man's other spawn, ended up in charge of the X-files after they had Mulder kicked off and handed over to Kersh.  And me, I ended up on the end of the old man's choke chain.  Because he knew I was never going to sit up, bark or roll over the way they would.

*~*~*~*~*

I never did figure out exactly what the old man's plan was during the couple of months that followed, whether he was testing me or trying to make me crack, and it was clear he wasn't about to come out and tell me; he liked it better when I was twisting in the wind.  But separating a person from familiar surroundings--especially when you don't give them any idea of when they might get back to the familiar--is a proven way of disorienting them, like putting a hood over somebody's head and taking them for a drive in the back seat of a limo.  And the old man had things to do.  So for the next couple of months he dragged me with him from one place to another and he barely let me out of his sight.  First stop: the Brit's Colorado place, which we turned inside out.  I barely slept, jacked up on the adrenaline that came with waiting for something to turn up that would tie the Brit and me together.  It didn't happen, though he did find the name of Dr. Carrie Phillips, the woman who'd treated me after the Brit pulled me out of the silo, penciled in an old notepad in the nightstand of the room where I'd spent so much of my recovery.  My worst moment was when we drove into town to her campus office and he wanted me to go ask her about her contact with the Brit.  I pointed out that a one-armed guy asking questions was something likely to stick in her mind, so eventually he went looking for her himself--one of the few times being an amputee has actually come in handy.  Thank god Carrie was out of town at some conference.

We were there for three days, but luckily we didn't come across anything else that would connect me to the Brit.  Or that would connect Marita and me, for that matter.  The Brit probably figured that at some point a member of the group would drop by unannounced looking for evidence that he had a secret side agenda.  After all, he'd never exactly hidden the fact that if certain of the group's decisions had been his to make, things would have gone differently.

When we left there, we caught a flight to the U.K. to do the same thing at his London estate.  Leaving Colorado, it was such a relief to be headed to a house I'd never been in before, where I didn't have to think about how to react to familiar things as if I'd never seen them, that I slept probably ten out of the twelve hours between O'Hare and Heathrow.  The Brit's wife had been gone for years--she'd been part of the hand-over of family members to the Colonists in 1973--but he had a caretaker for when he wasn't around.  We introduced ourselves as 'close business associates', announced his death and after a little wrangling were given access to his files and computer.  Once again, my pulse was doing double-time, but nothing incriminating turned up.  It may have been strictly business between me and the Brit, and he sure as hell hadn't been thinking of the potential fallout for me when he passed Mulder that vaccine and got himself killed, but at least he'd kept my name out of his records.  I had to give him that.

I was starting to think about sleeping in my own bed and working past the return trip's jet lag, getting back and setting up some kind of relative normal, whatever the hell that might be now--but no dice.  Instead of returning to the States, our next stop was Tunisia, where the group was setting up a new corn growing operation to replace the stateside crops they'd had to destroy after Mulder and Scully saw them.  It would be safer this way, no chance of Mulder or anyone else who might be suspicious stumbling across the grow, and the group had a good front there.  Tunisia'd always had to import corn because its soil was too saline to grow the stuff, but Strughold went in with a high-tech system that made cultivation possible.  The government was all too happy to let them do whatever they wanted in exchange for the technology. 

We were there for a week.  The first morning the old man took me along, so I got the grand tour of the operation, but after that he left me in town with a driver who was supposed to be there 'for my convenience' but who was really just a minder.  Given where I'd grown up--the way you naturally developed a radar for doublespeak and hypocrisy--I don't know why the old man even tried to disguise the fact.  Like I wasn't going to notice.  Anyway, I let Ramy give me the tour of Gabes, where we were staying--the market, the oasis, the grand mosque, the waterfront, the casino--but mostly I spent time walking the beach beyond our hotel, Ramy a good twenty paces away, a big man with a thick carpet of a moustache, quiet, like a herdsman keeping an eye on a flock of sheep or goats but sniffing the wind, too, for any sign of an approaching threat.  It had been years since I'd been in a Muslim country--since my stint in the Afghan war, followed by that weird 'homecoming celebration' the old man had put together for me in Tashkent afterward.  The celebration had been his, really: his little investment had survived combat and had picked up some new skills he'd be able to exploit.  Over time, I'd done a pretty good job of suppressing my Afghan days, but they were starting to leak back in now.  Which clipped my already-short fuse down to almost nothing.

Sitting around with too much time on my hands, I was starting to wonder what the hell I was in for.  I was definitely starting to curse the Brit.  If he hadn't swiped that vial of vaccine and handed it off to Mulder, I wouldn't be in this mess.  I'd have some autonomy, and a collaborator if I needed one, even though the Brit  hadn't been doing me any favors the last couple of months.  Now I was treading water at best, in limbo, no contacts.  Which was probably just what the old man had in mind.  And it was getting to me.  Lying in bed at night, my pulse felt like the clock ticking down to Colonization.  I could feel the weight of what I wasn't getting accomplished: no plans, no connections, no progress.  It left me itching to  _do_ something--contact Tolya to see what was going on in the rest of the world, update with Ansbach, check in with Che; it had been a good three months now, and who knew what the guy was up to.  But I couldn't risk it; I wasn't going to lead the old man to the few people I had left.  Definitely not to Che.  I'd just have to wait it out, watch for my opportunity.

Evidently my moment wouldn't be coming anytime soon, though.  Twenty minutes after lifting off from Tunisia, headed toward the Atlantic, our plane made a big southward arc and the old man announced that we were headed for Antarctica.  The shock of it sent my frustration level through the roof, but I slapped on a passive face.  I wasn't about to let him see what he was doing to me.

The Colonists had settled a new ship into the snow not far from Druzhnaya 2, an abandoned Russian research base.  A section of the old base, patched back into service, would make a convenient hub for incoming Consortium researchers, and for housing support staff.  They were just getting started, so things were a little primitive, and there was the need not to have lights running at night that could be picked up by satellite photos.  Which wasn't much of a problem because it was November, the beginning of Antarctic summer, and the place was getting sunlight from four in the morning until eleven at night.

This time the old man didn't even take me along to see the ship.  Which was fine with me; I had no desire to set foot anyplace I knew there was Oil, even if it was supposedly locked away in a bunch of pods.  So I was left to to fend for myself at the station, not that there was anything much to do.  The yellowed stack of Russian magazines made for a few hours of amusing reading, but aside from that my main options were to poke around the abandoned buildings or watch the stealth construction going on, burrowing down to build below the aging pre-fabs in order to hide the group's presence, the work timed to avoid known satellite passes.  Sometimes I'd walk down to the bay and look out at the water crowded with eerie blue icebergs.  It was another world--eerie, empty world.  It brought too many thoughts of how the whole planet might end up someday, when the aliens had used us up and moved on.

I thought far too much at Druzhnaya.  About the irony, for one thing, of being stuck in a second Russian outpost that the old man had hauled me to.  Thirty-one years and I hadn't been able to shake the old buzzard.  Temporarily, yeah, but he'd always been around, waiting in the wings to snag me again.  Maybe I wouldn't be doing any worse by taking off and going it on my own once we got back to civilization.  Che could help me set up a new identity.  I could go back and base myself out of Moscow or St. Petersburg, use Tolya's network of contacts to gather whatever useful information I could. 

Another idea that came--one I would never have believed I'd be giving a serious thought to--was to check out of this rat race altogether. I mean, there was no guarantee I wouldn't be run over by a truck a few weeks down the road even if I decided to stay and fight. It was tempting on the face of it: take off and settle someplace like that island I'd visited once off the coast of Canada.  Hike in the woods, watch killer whales breech from the porch of a little cabin, fall asleep in a rocking chair only to wake up with the late afternoon sun on me, everything around me quiet.  Block out what was coming and soak in the world's details that I'd always had to run past, scrambling after that big goal... a goal I had about a snowball's chance in hell of reaching anyway, given the way the chips had fallen. 

Who knows whether I could actually have pulled it off--you know, turned off the constant alarm in the back of my mind and sunk into the moment, pretended there wasn't a piano hanging over our heads with the support ropes fraying.  But taking off would have meant admitting the old man had won.  I wasn't ready to give him that satisfaction.

It was early December by the time we got back to New York.  I was hoping the rushed pace of the city, all the holiday fuss and the change of scenery would take away the dreams I'd started having in Antarctica--about Andrei, from the camp.  After I lost the arm I promised myself over and over, before the Kazakhstan attack, that when things settled down I'd find some way to pay Andrei back for everything he'd done for me, because if not for all his pushing, I never would have recovered from losing the arm.  'You have important work to do,' he'd say in his quiet, no-bullshit way, knowing just how carefully to nudge me so I wouldn't push back. 

Yeah, well, obviously he'd read me wrong.  What was it Mulder'd said?  A couple drops short of bone dry?  Okay, so Mulder's a self-righteous dick.  I didn't make Andrei string himself up like that--it still burned me up, that he'd done that--but I sure as hell was responsible for what came before: I'd held a gun to the head of the one man I was seriously beholden to in this world and made him do things he'd never have agreed to in his worst nightmares. 

In D.C., there was a new normal in Mulder's old basement office.  Jeffrey was playing gatekeeper, but he made a piss-poor one if you ask me.  Where Mulder'd been invested in believing, Jeff was just as stubbornly--stupidly--determined not to.  Nobody was going to be investigating anything the group considered sensitive under his watch.  Which was what the old man had in mind, I guess.  Mulder and Scully had been taken from Skinner and handed to another A.D., and Diana was there as Jeffrey's keeper... not to mention where she could conveniently show up on cue to taunt Mulder or throw Scully off-balance.  Mulder and Scully were being given nothing but grunt work, but Mulder hadn't gotten frustrated enough to put his hand inside the cookie jar that would get him fired for good.  Yet. 

That, after all, was what the old man was waiting for.

\---------------------------

BONUS: INTERVIEW WITH GIBSON PRAISE

_When Gibson disappears from the power plant, where does he go?_

_Note: When I'm stuck while writing and have no idea what happens next, one of the techniques I use to give myself direction is to interview the characters. In these interviews, I'm never visible; I simply observe--a fly on the wall. I envision the interviewer as a rather formal man in a suit. He sits in one of two stackable plastic chairs, and the character sits in the other. Generally I find that if I prime the interviewer with just one or two questions, the interview will take off from there and find its own course, often revealing interesting details and directions I never would have thought of. At the outset of this interview, my goal was to find out what happened to Gibson after he disappears from the power plant at the conclusion of The Beginning (6x01)._

 

   


INTERVIEWER: So, you were face to face with the alien.

GIBSON: [nods]

INTERVIEWER: Was it scary?

GIBSON: Yeah. I couldn't think of what to do, but we were both scared.

INTERVIEWER: You understood it?

GIBSON: I could read its mind.

INTERVIEWER: Did it know that?

GIBSON: I think so. I guess. [shrugs]  It didn't try to hurt me.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you get out of the locked room, out of the power plant?

GIBSON: Diana. She had to call in a whole bunch of FEMA guys after they took Mulder away. I knew what she was going to do--take me back to the place where they'd been experimenting on me.

INTERVIEWER: But you weren't going to let that happen.

GIBSON: Would you?

INTERVIEWER: No. [pauses] So what did you do?

GIBSON: I knew her plan was to get me out of there before the FEMA crew came in, because they didn't want anyone to know about me. She was going to put me back in the van of the guy who'd taken me there until she'd finished her FBI stuff, and then when they were busy inside looking for the alien, she was going to slip away, get me and take me back to Socorro.

INTERVIEWER: That's where Alex Krycek took you in June?

GIBSON: Yeah. [thinks]

INTERVIEWER: What?

GIBSON: I don't think he knew.

INTERVIEWER: Knew what?

GIBSON: What they planned to do with me. He had some ideas, but they weren't nearly as bad as what actually happened.

INTERVIEWER: And if he'd known?

GIBSON: [shrugs] I don't think he would have let me escape, but... He didn't like it, taking me there. He kept trying to convince himself I'd be okay.

INTERVIEWER: So, back to the van. Did Diana tie you up? How did you get out? Or did you escape sometime later?

GIBSON: She used some electrical tape she found inside the van. Luckily she didn't have handcuffs. My mouth wasn't taped that well, and after a while I could tell someone had come up and parked next to the van. So I made all the noise I could.

INTERVIEWER: What if it had been Diana?

GIBSON: I could tell it wasn't her. It was a man with a food truck. The kind that sells snacks and stuff.

INTERVIEWER: And he heard you?

GIBSON: Yeah. He saw the tape on me, and then he saw the stitches on my head, and he was scared.

INTERVIEWER: So he left you there?

GIBSON: No. He had a brother who'd been kidnapped by a drug gang where he came from, in Mexico. He grabbed me and put me in a closet inside his truck and drove off right away.

INTERVIEWER: He wanted to save you.

GIBSON: Yeah. He didn't want what happened to his brother to happen to someone else.

INTERVIEWER: So what happened next?

GIBSON: He took me to his house, but his wife didn't want me to stay there. She was afraid someone would come after me and they'd all get in trouble.

INTERVIEWER: Because the man had taken you?

GIBSON: In case some gang was following me. And because they they had no papers. They were illegal.

INTERVIEWER: So what did they do with you?

GIBSON: A cousin of theirs was planning on going north, looking for work. So they sent me with him.

INTERVIEWER: And where did you go?

GIBSON: He left me in Idaho. I found this deaf guy who was herding sheep, and I helped him, so he let me stay. I knew I needed to be somewhere nobody would see me, because I knew they'd be out looking. And probably putting my face on milk cartons or something. The sheepherders in Idaho, they're on their own most of the time. They hardly ever go near towns and people. And Amaro knew how to do things--build fires, cook, mend his clothes. Chase away wild animals, make tools. Stuff I didn't know how to do, but I figured at some point I might need to. I might need to take off and live alone if I found out they were catching up with me, 'cause I wasn't going to let anybody use me as a guinea pig again.

INTERVIEWER: So Amaro taught you those things?

GIBSON: [nods]

INTERVIEWER: And how long were you there?

GIBSON: Almost two years. And then a man--a man but an alien--came along and told me they needed my help somewhere. And it was getting toward winter, and winters are really cold there. So it was a good time to leave.  

\-----------------------------

NARRATIVE D

_The Cigarette Smoking Man keeps Krycek on a short leash and begins to use him in a campaign to break Mulder's spirit._

 

I'm guessing the old man didn't want to bring me back to the board room and show me off, or even remind the old geezers that I existed.  But since he'd told them he was going to be grooming me for bigger things, I figure he felt obliged.  My advantage.

There was some talk about alien rebels.  Well, the topic under discussion was the hybrid program.  They were finally starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, and with the approach of success comes paranoia.  There hadn't been any recent signs of rebels or rebel activity, but that didn't stop the speculation.  What stuck with me was a look I caught on the old man's face--not the same as the rest of the old men, worried and speculating, but a sudden blanched look and then a quick effort to smooth it over.  I kept an eye on him after that.  For the rest of the meeting he looked like he'd bitten into something bitter and couldn't get the taste out of his mouth.

"So what do you think the threat is from the aliens?" I asked as the elevator carried us toward the lobby and our limousine.

He stopped short.  "What are you asking, Alex?"

I shrugged.  "You stay three steps ahead of the rest of them.  You think the Rebels are likely to come screaming in if somebody tips 'em about Cassandra?"

"We've spent fifty years working to assure the project's secrecy."  He lit a Morley and took a long drag.  "Screaming in?  No.  Anyone--even an alien--with that kind of capability would find a more subtle way to reach that sort of objective.  You"--he waved the cigarette at me--"what would you do if you wanted to infiltrate an enemy project?"

"Make myself look like someone who belonged there," I said, before it suddenly hit me that he might take it as an admission of how I'd managed to access the Russian vaccine.

Luckily, the elevator settled just then and the door opened.  The old man moved ahead of me, mumbled something about having an appointment, and headed for the curb.  Which was fine with me; I had no desire to get into a conversation about how I'd managed to tap into the Russian vaccine, or what I might have done with it afterward.

In the back of the taxi, though, I had a thought that chilled me.  There were clones.  Not just the kids at the Alberta facility, but others the Colonists or their splinter groups had managed to produce over the years.  Cloning just one researcher close to the work would be all it took.

Great.  One more thing to keep me awake at night.

 

~*~*~*~*~

 

After that he shipped me off to D.C., saying he had 'a purpose' for me there.  Part of which had to be keeping me off the Elders' radar, though he never would have admitted it. 

Whatever. 

It had been a while since I'd actually spent more than passing time in Washington.  My gut feeling about the place was a big negative: It's where I'd partnered with Mulder, and we all know how that turned out.  It's also where I was on assignment with that stupid fuck Cardenal when he shot Scully's sister.  Looking back, I could have handled the aftermath of that a lot better than I did, but realizing it doesn't change the outcome. 

The old man tried to blow me up here.

Great memories. 

On the other hand, Mulder'd found my tiny little shoebox of a place here the last time I was in town, and that had been... I don't know.  A one-time truce is no guarantee of a turnaround, but when your life's been a series of down elevators, just one trip that carries you up a floor is a nice pause in the madness.  And Ché was here.  I hadn't had contact with the guy in months, hadn't seen him in nearly a year; he was probably wondering whether I was still alive.  I'd have to meet with him once I'd figured out a way to do it without the old man finding out.

Life being full of twists and turns, though, there was no telling what this stint in D. C. would bring.

One thing was for sure: I was going to have to find new digs. While the old man was dragging me halfway around the world, the lease on my little hole-in-the-wall place had expired.  Number one on my wish list would have been to get a place the old man would never be able to find, but there was no way it was going to be practical at this point.  I started looking, found myself a room in a tired building in Adams Morgan and moved in. 

The old man was busy going through the hybrid program research staff one by one, calling them in for 'interviews' about the progress of their work and then slipping in questions about stuff only a true insider could know.  Of course, it didn't mean the rebels hadn't been lurking around for decades and infiltrated the group years ago; if they had, a rebel clone could know as much as any of the other scientists there. I wondered if he'd thought about that.

Mulder and Scully were in and out of town, on pathetic make-work assignments designed to wear Mulder down.  Or maybe Scully'd break first, get frustrated enough to transfer to another field office, or head out to practice medicine in the civilian sector.  Just as good for the old man; it would make Mulder crumble even faster. 

The old man had me break into both their places while they were out of town, just to have a look around.  Nothing of interest at Scully's place.  If she was thinking about moving on to another area or some other type of job, she'd left no evidence of it around her apartment or on her computer.  Mulder's place was the usual mess--scattered file folders, lists of contacts, a half-empty carton of orange juice in the fridge along with a couple of takeout boxes and a jar of mustard.  The cupboard held a few cans of soup, some dead crackers and most of a bottle of whiskey.  A shirt and a sweater were tossed on the leather chair in the corner of the living room.  The trash can was knocked over, but there was no way to tell whether it had been an accident or whether he'd kicked it out of frustration.  Apparently he was still sleeping on his couch, because the bedroom was full of file boxes, like it had always been.  Hell, I could never figure why he did it; if I had a nice bed like that, I sure as hell wouldn't have wasted it by sacking out on the couch every night.  Besides, if someone were coming after you, being in the bedroom could give you a little advantage.

The old man seemed less than enthusiastic about what I'd found, but then what did he expect?  Mulder's as stubborn as they come, and trying to tear him away from the job he'd hitched himself to body and soul was only going to make him hold on tighter.  Until he hit some kind of real breaking point.  No matter how devoted you think you are to something, those points come.  Believe me, I knew.

I asked the old man how his interviews were going; he said he hadn't come across anything suspicious so far, but they were time-consuming and he needed to make sure he'd checked out every single person working on the project.  He mentioned what a great job Diana was doing keeping tabs on stuff at the FBI.  His pride in her showed, but good old Jeff didn't fare nearly as well.  Besides the obvious, he wasn't a carbon copy of the old man.  Well, you have a kid, you roll the dice.  No telling what you'll get, especially if you push the kid out and leave him to make his own way through the world.

At first there wasn't much to do day-to-day since they kept sending Mulder out of town on assignment.  I think the old man liked that, knowing it left me floating.  He knew it would give me plenty of time to speculate on what was coming, unable to do a damn thing about it.  I needed to make some contacts, get some sort of a foothold for myself, but it was obvious he had somebody watching me, to make me feel the pressure of his thumb on me.  I'd expected that, and though I knew it'd be temporary, for the moment my hands were tied.  Maybe it was the frustration that brought the dreams on.

They'd started in Antarctica, me walking through the door of that Tunguska cell and catching site of Andrei swinging from an electrical cord.  It burned me up, just like it had when it actually happened.  Sure, I'd made him fill the kid with Oil and stitch him up, but the hanging--that was his own work.  Granted, once Lev found out Andrei'd followed orders that hadn't come from him, he probably would have shot Andrei on the spot anyway.  But the hanging was more than an escape: It was Andrei's way of leaving me with a big "Fuck you" on his way out: After all he'd done for me, how could I treat him that way? 

He knew it would get to me.  Well, the message came through loud and clear.

After that first time, I'd walk through any door--random doors--in my dreams, and Andrei would be dangling there, his body just barely swinging, the room silent except for the low squeak of the weighted cord.  At first I only saw him from behind.  Now when it happened, he was facing me.  He was dead but his eyes weren't; they'd follow me until I'd either turn and walk out or wake up gasping.  So I wasn't getting as nearly as much sleep as I would have liked.

Maybe ten days after the first time I'd gone to Mulder's apartment, the old man decided I should be checking it regularly.  He must have figured Mulder was on the ropes, or close to it.  I was supposed to check his computer, phone messages, any paperwork I found, the contents of the fridge, the whiskey bottle, the medicine cabinet.  I wasn't seeing any big changes.  But I was upping the chances Mulder'd walk in on me while I was there, and I had no desire for another phone in the face, or Mulder's fists, or whatever he'd end up going at me with if he found me there.

It was nearly Christmas, not that the holiday had ever been on my radar.  The old man had gone out of town for a week or so, and I was pretty sure he'd dropped the tail he'd had on me in the beginning, though I couldn't verify it, so I was still putting off meeting with Ché.  One day, in a local Ecuadorian bar, I ran across Raul Cisneros, the guy I'd trained to infiltrate FarmaCol in an attempt to get hold of the vaccine piling up in Cali.  He'd sworn off trying to play secret agent, he said.  He was looking around for better opportunities, but for the moment he was getting by working in a machine shop in Silver Spring.  At least it was safe... aside from having caught his finger in a press the week before.  He showed me a purple and black fingernail as proof.  I said I was doing odd jobs and biding my time.  I asked if he were interested in maybe doing a job or two on the side--minor stuff, nothing like we'd trained for before--and he said he might be.  I told him I didn't have anything at the moment, but I'd be in touch when something came up.  He gave me his phone number and an e-mail address.  I memorized them both and flushed the piece of paper they were scrawled on before I left the place.

A single contact.  It was pathetic, when I thought about it later that night.  No plan, no real playing pieces on the big board.  No leverage.  Just one lone guy who might be able to help me if it were exactly the right assignment. 

Might.

Seeing Raul had taken me back to a time when I'd still had possibilities, when there was a chance to get at the Cali vaccine and distribute it, and I'd still had a contact in the board room.  The good old days when I'd been working on the assumption that the old man was gradually rotting away below the neatly-mowed lawn of a cemetery over in Edgewood. 

On the way home I bought a bottle of vodka and went back to my place.  Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I took a good look at myself.  I was getting old.  Mussed hair, an assortment of scars here and there. The slight lean to the left that I hated to see, compensation for having taken off the fake arm.

I punched the mirror and watched it shatter.

And Armageddon waiting for us just above the clouds. 

Stepping around the broken pieces, I went out, found a glass and tossed back a drink.

 

~*~*~*~*~

 [The following section, expanded, forms part of the Christmas fic [The Night Before](http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/Xmas2.htm).]

The dreams got worse.  The day before Christmas, I woke up to the sound of liquid pouring and thought I saw Andrei sitting on the desk chair with a glass in his hand.  Worse, he was talking to me.  Once I got hold of myself, the dream finally disappeared, but I found a little puddle of something wet on the chair.  It smelled like orange Stoli.

It was nearly two in the afternoon.  I'd drunk myself to sleep the night before--and the night before that--which was only going to play into the old man's hand if he came back and found me this way.  I had to get a grip somehow.  I got up, took a piss, dressed, made myself eat something and went out walking.  The clouds were low--the kind just waiting to drop a load of snow.  Good news for the neghborhood kids, if nothing else.  I walked through Rock Creek Park and out as far as the old cemetery on the Georgetown side, anything to keep moving and clear my head.  By the time I made it back through the park it was getting dark.  I was tired and hungry, and the walking hadn't taken me nearly far enough from my problems.  And I was in no hurry to go to sleep again and give Andrei another chance at me.  Coming to a park bench, I sat down and watched the first few falling flakes and tried not to think. 

Gradually my mind drifted to the snow that used to pile up against our building when I was a kid, the way it would build up until the downstairs windows were covered and only gave off a dull gray glow.  Must've been really out of it, because when a running shoe settled on the bench beside me, I nearly jumped.  Hands reached out and started tying the shoe laces.  When I looked up, I could hardly believe it.  It was Mulder. 

He said he was out for a run before the snow hit, but that didn't explain what he'd be doing in this neighborhood.  Maybe he'd tracked me, but how would he have gotten a lead on me?  If he'd been at Scully's and started from there, it wouldn't be a stretch to have ended up here.  Or--third possibility--he could be a figment of my imagination, like Andrei that morning.  I'd been in a crazy head space for hours; maybe it was all in my mind.

Whatever the reality, our little encounter didn't last long.  Mulder took off jogging a few minutes later, headed toward the park.  I started back to my place, still wondering whether the whole thing had been real or not.  He'd been decent to me; that made it twice in a row.  Then again, Andrei had been his old encouraging self this morning, too, and if my head was making all this up, what did it mean?  What kind of game was my subconscious playing?  Whatever it was, Andrei didn't visit me that night.  Or the next.

 

~*~*~*~*~

 

When the old man got back into town a few days later, something had changed.  I wasn't sure what it was, and he wasn't about to tell me, but he was wound a lot tighter than before.  His voice was more clipped and he was more standoffish than usual.  He asked how long it had been since I'd been to a practice range, and set me up to go to an indoor range in Rockville. 

The prospect of having to take weekly trips that far made me realize it was time to get a car of my own.  It was also my chance to finally connect with Ché.  I bought a newspaper from a vending machine, went into a bar I'd never been in before, where the old man wouldn't have any convenient ears listening in, and spent some time looking like I was studying the classifieds.  Then I called Ché from the pay phone.  I told him what I wanted: something maybe three or four years old, as common as possible, the kind of car that would never stand out in anybody's mind, but dependable and maybe with a little extra power in case I needed it.  He'd find me what I wanted and then we'd meet, with him posing as the seller.  My 'test drive' would give us a chance to catch up.

It took nearly a week before I got a call back.  We set up a meeting, but I couldn't shake my underlying jitters: Ché was the one guy I could count on, a source who'd been with me for years, and I couldn't afford to have the old man or his minions find out about him and put the kid in jeopardy.  I hadn't saved him from a long prison sentence--or worse--in Prague only to lead the vultures to his doorstep here in the U.S.

We met in Hyattsville because it was nowhere either of us would go otherwise.  Besides, Ché was planning on shadowing me on my way home to see whether the old man still had a tail on me, so I wanted the trip to last long enough to be sure.  I almost didn't recognize the kid at first because he'd tied back all that frizzy hair of his and had it tucked under a cap.  We both played our parts--shook hands like the strangers we were supposed to be, walked around the car, poked around under the hood, checked the wheel wells for rust.  Finally I got into the driver's seat, Ché went around to the passenger side and we pulled away.

Out of the parking lot and finally headed north, Ché heaved a sigh.

"I don't think I'm cut out for this sort of thing," he said.  "In the planning stages, it seemed viable enough, but--"

I glanced over at him, and for the first time, I grinned.  "You're sweating."

"I work better from behind the screen of a computer; you know that as well as anyone, Aleksei."

I nodded behind us.  "Take a look.  Anyone back there?" 

Ché pulled a mirror from his pocket, angling it until he had a view of the traffic following us.  Nice.  I made a turn, went two blocks and turned again and kept going, almost holding my breath until finally Ché gave the all-clear.  Relief washed over me.  I made one final turn, pulled over and parked.  We still shouldn't take too much time.

"So, how is the world with you, Aleksei?"

My mouth opened but nothing came out.  This wasn't where I wanted to start.  And how could I sum up the last ten months?  I shrugged.  "Three steps forward, two back, the last one right down a manhole into the sewer," I glanced into the rear view mirror. "Still there."

"You look thin, my friend."

"There's more bed news." I turned back to him. "The old man's alive.  And he's got his hooks in me.  For now, anyway."  A pause.  "Vaccine's gone."

He looked blindsided. Pained. 

There were the rebel attacks, too, and the possibility they might be on the verge of coming back to incinerate us... but I wasn't going to lay that on him and have it hanging over his head from here on out.  I shrugged.  "Sorry.  Not exactly your ray of sunshine, am I?"

"Ray of sunshine?"  His expression changed suddenly, like he'd eaten something bitter, and the next thing I knew we were both laughing--him at what I'd said, me at the look on his face.  Crazy, but it was an icebreaker we probably both needed.  "Aleksei Dmitrievich, no one could ever accuse you of being a ray of sunshine!"

"I guess."  I cleared my throat, fighting back the grin that had taken over my face.  Time to get back to business.

Ché followed suit.  "Seriously, nothing is over until it's over, my friend.  We'll find a way to make some progress.  And"--he wagged a finger at me--"when it is safe, you must come over and let me feed you.  You need more meat on your bones, and my stove would be happy to have a good Czech meal cooking on it.  When you eat alone, you know, you don't put so much effort into it."

"You're a babushka at heart, you know that?"

"A benefit sometimes, no?"  A smile showed and then faded.  "But the car--we must do this.  What do you think?"

I nodded.  "Seems like a good fit."

Actually, it was pretty much ideal.  I thought about that as I drove it back toward D.C.: a white Nissan sedan, five years old but garaged so it hadn't rusted, one there'd be hundreds of in the area.  Automatic transmission, an advantage with the dead arm, especially if things got hot--if I had to make a run for it.  Not torn up, but not immaculate.  In other words, practically invisible.

So, one item checked off my list.  The next would be to find out whether the old man still had a tail on me.  Within an hour an e-mail came in from Ché: He  hadn't seen anyone following me on my way home.  Two items checked off.

My little taste of freedom didn't last long.  On my first trip to the Rockville range, sighting down the barrel of my Beretta, two questions hit me: 1) Why me?  There were a half-dozen two-armed guys the old man could call on to do his dirty work--guys who could handle a weapon a lot more easily than I could these days, when loading a magazine was a major project and racking the slide could be damn awkward.  Question #2: Who was my target?  Someone on the research staff?  A low-level pencil-pusher who'd stumbled across something he wasn't supposed to know?  Some unlucky bastard who the old man had decided wasn't pulling his weight?

Or maybe somebody not caving to calculated pressure. 

The thought made my gut go cold. Granted, the old man's line about the dangers of turning Mulder's religion into a crusade had always made Mulder pretty much untouchable.  But now I couldn't help but wonder.  Maybe the old man had finally had it with Mulder not caving.  It couldn't be that hard to stage a scene that looked like it had absolutely nothing to do with Mulder's agenda or his enemies.

It might be smart to keep a closer eye on what Mulder was up to, so I could head him off if he started down some crazy path.  On one of my regular trips to check out Mulder's apartment, I set up recording equipment in the cleaning closet in the hallway outside.  Well, new equipment; there was an old audio set-up still there that the Brit had put in at one point.  I pulled it out and put in my new stuff--a step up this time, with video--drilled a few holes and set the mini-camera to show the living room.

The recordings gave me a clearer picture than just checking Mulder's cabinets and drawers.  He was losing it--at least, he was going to be losing something he valued, and soon, if he didn't wake up.  He had every reason to be frustrated at the way he was being played, but he was reacting like a teenager, playing the cool guy who doesn't care... about anything.  When Scully'd come over to compare notes, instead of helping her hammer out their reports, he'd wisecrack about Kersh or their stupid assignments, or try to convince her they should go out and shoot some hoops instead. Which was leaving Scully to carry more than her share of the load. The fact that Scully was starting to bend under her burdens--both the general pointlessness and having to pick up Mulder's slack--well, I'm pretty damn sure he wasn't picking up on that at all.  

What I couldn't figure out what why he wasn't talking about leaving. Hell, if it were me, I'd have been out of there as soon as they tried to hand me over to Kersh.  But then having to switch directions at the drop of a hat was something I'd learned the hard way.  Mulder'd spent his whole career in one place.  Maybe he couldn't see himself doing anything else.  Or maybe it was just that he was mule-stubborn, determined not to let go.  After all, twenty years on and with no real evidence to light the way, he was still searching for his sister.

I wasn't sharing any of this with the old man, and it was possible I'd been filtering my reports to him more than I realized, because over dinner a week or so later he asked me which I thought would make Mulder jump higher: a lead on Samantha or some sort of tip about the Colonists.  You could tip him about the new ginseng grow out in Alberta, I said, not for any strategic reason but because it was the first thing that fell out of my mouth.  The old bee operation had been cleared out, but finding out there was another one might prick his interest without exposing anything critical. 

I wasn't suggesting; I was just trying to get through a meal so I could leave the old man and his stench behind.  But a week later, in Mulder's apartment, I was checking his messages when the voice on a new message nailed me to the spot.  It was Marita. 

"I have some information about a new settlement in Alberta, much like the one you saw two years ago..."

Our little meeting on the freighter came flooding back in: the set-up, the lies, the bitter shock of Marita's betrayal.  The way it had torn apart everything we'd been working for.

"... If you receive this after Friday, respond only to this number--" 

I jabbed at the 'erase' button.  She'd sold out our plan, destroyed the secret vaccine program--the one real hope we'd had of fighting colonization--and this call was a set-up anyway, not anything Mulder needed to hear. 

Of course, Mulder was supposed to take the bait, and now I'd dumped it. 

Well, it was too late now.  I'd bought Mulder a little more time. 

How much, though, was anybody's guess.

Much as I tried to fight it, the thought of Marita stuck in my head like cobwebs.  I had no idea what had happened to her after the freighter, beyond the fact that Miguel Ansbach and his team had eventually managed to get the black oil out of her, and I didn't care.  Obviously she'd recovered enough to leave Mulder that message.  I hadn't heard the old men in the board room mention her at all.  Had they given her back her old position?  It would be like Marita to be able to just waltz back in and pick up right where she'd left off. 

I wondered how she'd reacted when she found out the Cali vaccine, the sum of all her secret work for years, was gone.

I was still thinking about her a few nights later while Ché put the finishing touches on a home-cooked dinner.  The smells were great--a pork stew with  _knedliky_ , his homemade Czech dumplings.  One of the best meals ever set out on a plate. 

"Perhaps I can distract you with my own sad story," Ché said when we'd finally sat down to eat.

I glanced up briefly.  "What, is my personal storm cloud showing?" I downed another mouthful of stew. "What's up?"

"A few weeks ago I was backed into by this"--he frowns and almost sputters--"this idiot in a red Buick."

"On your bike?"

"Yes.  He wasn't looking, and when I collided with the bumper--not very hard at all--he got out and accused me of running into him.  He works for D.C. metro police, a little man but puffed up; he's after me to pay for a dent that was already in his bumper, saying that if I don't pay, he'll pull strings at the police department and--"  Ché was almost shaking.  He stopped to compose himself and frowned.  "Aleksei, you know I can't get mixed up in this.  I have no papers. Well, no official papers"--a quick grin--"though my forged ones are, of course, of the highest quality."

"You weren't hurt?" I said, remembering the time I'd taken care of him with broken ribs after a car had smacked into him.

"No, no.  But he's around me like a mosquito, calling and calling."

"You know where he lives?"

"He didn't tell me, but of course I tracked down the address."  A glint of satisfaction showed in his eye.

"Good," I said.  I had a plan.

Having someone in my pocket inside Metro PD could come in handy, and besides, nobody was going to get away with harrassing Ché.  This jerk was going to regret what he'd done.

With the address Ché'd found, and after a couple of days to figure out our target's schedule, I spent an hour or so getting to know Charles "Buzz" McCarthy through his computer, his wastebasket, his video collection, his refrigerator, his closets and his phone records.  I tailed him a few times before and after work.  He was a custodian at the station house in the fifth district, not even an officer, a little weazel of a guy with a receding hairline and a need to find someone he could push around. 

The Buick was obviously his baby.  It wasn't any status car, but except for the dent in the back that Ché couldn't possibly have made, the car was immaculate inside and out.  Which made me want to make a few modifications to it with a sledge hammer.  Or maybe my Beretta.  But satisfying as that would have been, it wouldn't get me what I really needed. 

Going through McCarthy's computer, I found parallel spread sheets showing he was cooking the books for somebody's business.  Question was, why would a guy who could do that have to work as a janitor?  It didn't make sense... unless he was using his access at the station to do something more profitable than cleaning floors.  I didn't have any proof of that, but what was on his computer would do fine.  I copied the files and contacted Raul.  I wasn't going to make any mistakes here.  McCarthy would never see or know enough to identify me; Raul would be my go-between, keeping me anonymous.  

The way Raul told it, I missed quite the scene when he approached McCarthy at the bar where he was a regular.  Raul didn't mess around.  He told the little fucker he had something that might interest him; then he laid the printouts of the cooked files on the table.  Evidently McCarthy's jaw dropped open at that point and stayed there while Raul laid everything out: Nobody was going to find out what he was up to as long as McCarthy stopped trying to contact the bicyclist he'd hit.  Immediately.  Cease and desist.  And there might be a favor or three we'd be needing down the road. 

There was the momentary surge of the win; to tell the truth, it was the best I'd felt in a hell of a long time.  On a small scale it was like having delivered a batch of the secret vaccine, or the moment when I knew I'd won Lev's trust at the camp. Then came the let-down: Looking at the bigger picture, it was like gaining a fly swatter to help you fight an army.  It showed how far my world, not to mention my ability to influence, had shrunk.

I kept up my trips to the Rockville range every week, like the old man had told me to.  There was no telling who my target would end up being, or what sort of scenario the old man had in mind, but my instinct was rumbling louder and louder that I'd done more than enough of this short-range shit, that I should really be practicing with a rifle.  Logically, who'd trade away the obvious advantages--anonymity at distance, and greater accuracy--for the potential of getting caught working at close range with a handgun?  Unless that was the old man's plan: I get rid of someone who annoys him and he gets rid of me when I get caught.  Well, thanks, but I wasn't going to be spending time in anybody's prison.

I did some asking around and found out about an outdoor range in a little Maryland town about two hours outside of D.C. in the middle of nowhere.  It was right around freezing, a gray day in late February with a scattering of snow on the fields, but the quiet, the cold and the emptiness suited my mood just fine, and the range itself was more than adequate.  I took my time putting 50 rounds through a half-dozen targets and was relieved to find I hadn't lost my touch; at 100 yards, the handful of shots outside the bulls-eye were off by less than half an inch.  Still, every time I'd be sighting down that scope, exhaling just enough to ease the crosshairs into the middle of the red circle, the questions would be right there: What was I preparing for?  And was the old man planning on giving me up with this job?  Or was this whole prep thing just a bluff, a way to keep me off-balance so I couldn't get a foothold and build myself into any kind of threat to him?

At this point, I had no idea what he had in mind; he'd been doing a good cop/bad cop thing on me ever since we gotten to D.C. and yeah, it had left me off-balance.

So, what if my target were Mulder?  What would I do then?  Cutting and running at this point would mean giving up any chance I might still have to tap into whatever the old man or the group knew and potentially influence the future; I might as well just welcome the invading hordes in from the sky and wait to go up in flames. 

All this was running through my head as I stood afterward, looking out over the Chesapeake from the edge of the range property, feet and fingers aching with cold.  Toward the south, a long slit of pale yellow had melted through the blue-gray of the clouds a foot or so above the horizon.  There was something about the openness--maybe the total lack of people and the constant backstabbing that comes with them--that held me there until I was shivering.  Finally I turned back, stopped to warm myself in front of the wood stove in the range building, then headed back toward D.C.  When I got there, my phone was beeping with a message from the old man, pissed, wondering where I was since I'd been out of range for most of the day and hadn't told him where I'd gone.  "No more of this," he said when we met a couple of hours later.  I mumbled some kind of reply but it grated on me; I wasn't his dog or his chauffeur.

The old man seemed pleased about me going to the outdoor range, though.  There was no hesitation in his delivery, as if I'd caught him planning to set me up.  My rifle practice could "very well prove useful", he said.  I never could anticipate how he'd react to anything I did.  He was getting impatient with Mulder, though; he couldn't figure out why Mulder hadn't responded to the planted phone message.  Maybe he's just stubborn, I said, and doesn't want to give you the satisfaction.  It was no mystery to Mulder who was behind the efforts to boot him out of the Bureau.

The old man had decided it was time to tighten the screws a little.  Now when I went to Mulder's I was supposed to move a few things around, make him wonder whether someone had been in his apartment; after all, look how he'd reacted when he found Ostelhoff spying on him from upstairs.  Or maybe it was supposed to make him wonder whether he was going crazy--feed his paranoia. 

"Why not just get it over with?" I said.  "Hell, do it the old-fashioned way; find some poison that won't show up in a tox screen.  You could get ahold of something like that."

But he was in love with his damn cat-and-mouse game.  My part should have been easy enough, but I couldn't move a file folder without thinking of the way the old man would get off on the results, and god knows I had no interest in tearing Mulder down. The old man's sick little game was starting to really piss me off, especially given what I saw on Mulder's video feed: He wasn't noticing the things I did.  Which meant he was definitely off his game, farther gone than even the old man had realized.

"If I may say so, Aleksei, I think he's doing it to both of you," Ché said one afternoon after I'd ended up bitching about the old man's assignment without thinking.  "This tearing down he so delights in--what would he enjoy more than using you to destroy this man who is your own flesh and blood, and at the same time grinding you out, slowly, like one of his cigarette butts."

"Then what's his payoff?"

"Did he not send you to kill Mulder's father?  Why did he choose you?"

"Bill Mulder was about to expose us.  It was strategic.  He had to go."

"But would it not have been just as strategic if someone else had done the job?"

I shrugged.  I hadn't thought about it at the time; there'd just been the urgency of shutting old Bill up before he could spill the beans to his kid.

"I believe the old vulture plans this.  It may be an in-joke known only to him... but he likes that kind of thing, does he not, Aleksei?  Think: the irony of using one of Mrs. Mulder's sons, a woman who stubbornly stays with her husband even after the old man has claimed her, to take apart the other.  And then crushing the survivor--wiping his hands of all of you."

"A big 'fuck you' to the family."

"In essence."

I shook my head, thinking about it.  It sounded crazy.  But it was like the old man, too.  In fact, it fit like a glove.  If that was what he had in mind, then I wasn't going to play along and collapse like a good lackey. But in the end, how would that make me different from Mulder, hanging on even when the ship was sinking?  How often had I thought Mulder was playing the fool by not just cutting his loses and getting out of there.

"Aleksei--"

I looked up.  Ché was back at his computer. "What?"

"Someone is trying to contact you."

"Who?"

"Orwell.  Who is that?"

"Ansbach.  Miguel Ansbach, the researcher.  What's he want?"

"To meet with you."

I'd deliberately steered clear of Ansbach since the freighter incident.  He was Marita's fairy godfather; there was no way he was going to be looking at what happened from my side.  But in the message he sounded desperate.  He needed to see me, he said.  There were papers they needed delivered to the old man and he'd volunteered to drive them down so he'd have a solid cover story.  Could I meet him at the medical library at George Washington University?  He could arrange for a study room for privacy.

"What shall I tell him, Aleksei?"

I couldn't think of any reason it would be a set-up, unless the old man had arranged it to test my eagerness to make outside connections.  If that's what this was, though, it wouldn't prove much; the old man already knew I wouldn't be playing his errand boy if I had any kind of choice. 

But if Ansbach was on the level...  "Yeah.  Tell him yes.  Find out when, and any details."

Sleep didn't come easy that night.  The street light didn't usually keep me awake, but I must have spent a good hour staring at the ceiling above my bed, mapping the shadowed cracks in the paint and wondering what this meeting with Ansbach would bring.  Why would he need to see me now, when the vaccine production we'd been counting on had had a stake shoved through its heart months ago? 

Unless it had something to do with Marita.  Believe me, I wasn't looking forward to that kind of conversation.  What she'd done still didn't make a shred of sense.  I went back over our week in Mallorca, the last time we'd spent together before the rebels hit in Kazakhstan, and even now, a year after everything went to hell, when hindsight should have made it easier to pick out the red flags, I still wasn't seeing any signs of her planning to turn on me, or break away like she did.  There was no logic to it.  The vaccine program had been her life, her mission.  She had nothing to gain by putting it in jeopardy.  Nothing.  And there was everything to lose.

Four days.  I had four days to stew over what Ansbach's visit might bring.  Finally the day came.  I took the Red Line downtown and got off at Foggy Bottom.  The medical library was just across the street.  Ansbach had sent instructions, and I followed them up to a study room on the second floor.

"Hello, Alex," he said, looking up from a magazine he'd been reading. 

What I saw surprised me.  Ché had been telling me I looked like I'd lost some weight, but I had nothing on Ansbach.  The fullness in his face was gone, his hair seemed more gray and his clothes were definitely loose.

He stood and after a split-second delay, offered his hand.

"What's up?" I said.

"I won't keep you long since I'm sure you're busy and I, too, need to get back on the road so as not to raise suspicions about where my time has gone."  A pause.  "Things have been difficult recently, with the vaccine supply gone and"--he cleared his throat--"well, other things to attend to, in addition to my professional responsibilities.  However, I've continued to dedicate myself to the topical vaccine we discussed some time ago, and last week... I believe I've had a breakthrough, Alex.  Now I need to do testing... But the fact is, I've run out of money.  I was wondering if you might possibly--"

My mouth hung open.  A half dozen things shot through my head--hope, strategies.  Then reality hit.  "What, Marita tell you I might be your cash cow?"

"Now, Alex--"

"She had the gall to lie to me, steal that kid and bring the whole damn project crashing down on our heads--"

"And you had the gall to make a unilateral decision without the input of the woman who'd presented you with the most valuable opportunity in the world--to get the Russian vaccine out into the general population, where it would actually begin saving lives and giving us a chance to fight back."  He was red in the face, angry now, which wasn't his style.  After a few beats he started again, quieter.  "Look, don't think each of us hasn't gone over every step of what happened a hundred times, wishing we could turn back the clock.  And if everything had gone exactly as you planned, then what?  Would it have stopped the bullet that killed our man in Cali five months later, ending production of the vaccine entirely?  The fact is, nobody can foresee every eventuality; no one can script the moves that are completely out of our control, and there are all too many of them.  It's the way life is, Alex."

"Yeah, well, some of us didn't get to go right back to what we were doing before, as if nothing had happened."

Ansbach looked shocked.

"You think this has been easy for her, Alex?  Do you think she waltzed right back into her old assignments?"

"I heard the message she left on Mulder's answering machine."

"They made her do that."  His eyes were hard; they would've cut into me if they could have.  "There were compllications to her recovery, a series of seizures.  She's in a wheelchair now." He sighed.  "The reason I've spent so much time on the topical vaccine has been, as much as anything, to give Marita something to do--a focus, a reason to hope.  And to keep her from falling completely into a deep depression."   He shook his head.  "You wouldn't know her these days, Alex."

"That's fine with me."  I turned to go.

"We thought of you only because we believed that ultimately you were as committed to the idea of resistance as we are, no matter how things turned out last year."

His voice faded off as I pushed the door open and went out into the hallway, my head full of static.  Two flights of stairs down, it wasn't getting any better.  I started toward the Metro stop but then kept going, heading toward Washington Circle on foot.  I wasn't in any shape to be stuck in a crowded car with a bunch of other people.  At the circle I headed down Pennsylvania Avenue to Rock Creek Park and ended up following it all the way home.  I needed the time to think, to cool off.

Halfway there I knew I'd been a fool.  Yeah, it was like a knife in my gut that had never been pulled out, what Marita'd done and how things had gone because of it.  But here was Ansbach dangling real, genuine hope in my face and I was throwing it away for what?  Because I couldn't get over something I couldn't change that was dead and buried now?  I'd been hoping for options, hadn't I? Contacts who could make a difference?

Back at my place, I contacted Ché to check my bank accounts and get in contact with Ansbach about what he needed.  Luckily, the investments I'd made with the money from the DAT tape had paid off pretty well, and though I'd used a good portion of the original amount supporting the Russian research, my earnings since then had made up for some of the loss.  Within a few days the money was on its way to Ansbach.

Finally there was, if not exactly light at the end of the tunnel, at least a candle showing the shapes of things around me in the gloom.  It got a little easier to launch myself out of bed in the morning.  I'd go over to Mulder's and mess around with things a little and try not to dwell on the fact that he never even noticed my efforts.  What would I have to do to actually register on his radar?  Move the TV?  Take his computer?  The couch he slept on?  Whatever it was, there was no use pushing things to find out. Every day Mulder stayed in a holding pattern was better than the alternative.

At night, staring a the ceiling above my bed, I'd think about Anbach's vaccine and potential ways to distribute it.  After all, people would only have to touch the stuff.  Soap dispensers in public bathrooms?  Sunscreen?  Some guy stationed by a high-traffic door--say, on a university campus--pretending to clean it but instead keeping the handle greased with the vaccine, so that every person who pushed on that handle would end up with immunity to the Oil?  Just how much vaccine would it take to protect someone? How could you cover the most people with the least effort?  I'd have to get in contact with Ansbach sometime and ask him about this stuff.

What I tried not to think about was Marita.  Damn--a wheelchair.  I didn't want to picture her at all, though my mind wouldn't let go of it, like a puzzle I had to figure out before I could put it down.  She'd always been such a powerhouse, mentally and physically, and to be confined like that, especially knowing everything you'd worked for had gone down the drain... Hell, even at the camp hospital, after I lost the arm, I'd at least been able to remind myself that Mulder had gotten away, that he was immune from the Oil, which had been my main goal. 

I was at the old man's when the phone call came.  He looked surprised.  He frowned.  He got that steely-eyed gaze.

"What?" I said when he finally hung up.

The old man reached for a cigarette, lit it and took a puff.  "It seems I've been looking in the wrong place for a turncoat," he said.  "They've just discovered that one of our New York researchers, a man who's been part of the project almost since the beginning, recently received quite a large influx of money"--he took another puff--"not related to his income from us."

I clamped my jaw shut so my mouth wouldn't drop open.

"They're questioning Dr. Ansbach now, though so far he hasn't told them anything."  He let out a stream of smoke.  "There's a chance he wasn't alone in whatever he was up to.  He's been taking care of Ms. Covarrubias... or so we've been led to believe.  He was the one who came up with the treatment that saved her, but perhaps more than just science or loyalty to us was motivating him.  It does point to some interesting questions about Ms. Covarrubias herself."

God, I hated that casual tone he'd use when he was thinking about picking somebody apart.  Back at Ché's, I found out the funds hadn't been transferred directly to Anbach's account; Ché'd been smart enough to put the money in an account that Ansbach could draw from, one without any obvious connection to me.  So there should be no way for the fallout from this to come home to roost. 

Still, it was piss-poor comfort.  Ansbach and his vaccine efforts would be history now, and I was back to square one, my chance for influencing the future gone up like the smoke from one of the old man's Morleys.

And he still had his hooks in me.  Maybe it was time to come to a decision.  Stick around and wait for some piece of strategic information or a new contact to drop into my lap?  Cut my losses, admit that a single human was never going to be enough to fight off an alien invasion and head off to relax on a warm beach somewhere in whatever time was left?  Stick around and wait for a chance to take out the old man, who'd set me up in this nightmare game in the first place?  It might not save the world, but getting my own revenge would be something at least.

And what about Mulder?  I'd invested a hell of a lot of time and effort in him.  He was immune from the Oil--at the cost of my arm.  Could I just walk away from the possibility there?  Was I willing to buy into the idea that the two of us could realistically do anything to change the course this planet was on?  Would Mulder ever trust me enough for the two of us to collaborate?

Back to the day-to-day, what if Mulder were the target the old man seemed to be prepping me for?

Resist or serve: the classic dilemma.  What would I do?  How far would I go?  And where was the line?

Maybe I wouldn't know until I'd crossed it.

 

End of A Rat's Life

 

The saga continues in the Sanctuary series  
available here: <http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/S-index.htm>

 


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